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. These alternatives are not convenient or efficient but imagining and building them changes what is seen as possible. This course draws on that tradition but applies it to networked infrastructure and engineering — what we call eccentric engineering. Not engineering as optimization, but engineering as argument. The working hypothesis is that powerful works of design often 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 intervention and 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 it be different?