Special Topics in Computational Design

Catalog description

Today's wicked challenges are many-dimensional and fundamentally intractable, yet countless members of our university have great passion to confront them. Systems thinking and rigorous approaches to complex adaptive systems are required to model the nested entanglements across social, technical, and environmental contexts. However, the required systemic models and their underlying principles are not available in approachable form and have generally not been expressed in terms of wicked challenges. To address this gap, students in this seminar take part in researching and designing a global public colloquium called Colloquies for Transgenerational Collaboration to be held in hybrid mode in Fall 2023 at CMU. The unique organizing principle is to proceed from the concerns, worldview, and values of grad students and rising faculty, who will then be paired with local and international practitioners in systems, cybernetics, and wicked design challenges. The resultant public conversations will become the basis for on-going design and co-creation, to be documented and widely shared to benefit future researchers.