Fall 2026
Critical design uses the language and tools of design to ask questions rather than solve problems. It makes the familiar strange, renders the invisible legible, and proposes alternatives not because they are convenient but because imagining them, and building them, changes what is seen as possible. This course draws methods from this tradition, but applies them to networked infrastructure and engineering, what we will call eccentric engineering. Not engineering as optimization, but engineering as argument. The working hypothesis is that the most powerful design works do not just reveal broken systems but are themselves systems that run differently. This course is about critically engaging with function, and implementing critique through new propositions.
We will move through three modes: reading infrastructure, defamiliarizing infrastructure through making, and proposing alternates. The environmental dimension of this topic is the ground condition from which everything else follows. Computation is infrastructure, it is a physical thing embedded in a material, living world, and yet it is mostly designed as if it isn't. How might things be different?