Cultures of Making

Catalog description

Cultures of Making is an integrative studio that explores new frontiers of design that enable, empower, and interrogate the human in the 21st century. We will take the human body, identity, or image as a site of investigation and design new types of products for it. Through our designs, we will raise questions about the motivations behind quantifying ourselves, desires for being permanently available and connected, complacency with not having privacy or intimacy, and eagerness to substitute craft, labor, and decision-making with intelligent systems from self-driving cars to painting bots and trading algorithms. This studio will pursue a research - and production-oriented format. We will incorporate techniques and technologies from fields as diverse as printed electronics, biochemical fabrication, machine learning and robotics to develop applications that respond to the emergent perceptions of the human for its individual, social, or environmental identity.