Designing the Post Natural
DM-UY 9103
Program in Integrated Digital Media
370 Jay St, room 310
Professor Tega Brain
brain@nyu.edu • Office, 370 Jay St: MAGNET 358
Office Hours: Monday 5.00 – 6.00pm, Wednesday 3.00-5.00 pm
Join the class Slack. Invitation here.
Course Overview
“Neither tales of progress nor of ruin tell us how to think about collaborative survival. It is time to pay attention to mushroom picking. Not that this will save us -— but it might open our imaginations.”
– Anna Tsing
This semester, Designing the Post Natural focuses on the topic of attention. This design studio explores the post natural environments we inhabit and how we might design ways to sharpen our attention to their rapidly shifting dynamics. Through a series of projects we will probe opportunities and challenges presented by digital technologies to amplify daily environmental encounters and ecological entanglements. Course readings will introduce theoretical concepts of the environment, and offer a range of perspectives on what it means to live in an era shaped by human disturbance. We will look to the work of artists and designers who are prototyping new ways of perceiving, communing and collaborating with non-humans. We will engage with local environmental groups, explore environmental datasets and collections, and design of experimental environmental interfaces.
The course is structured around a series of projects, that are supported by lectures, readings, workshops and field trips. Each asks you to design an an interaction or engagement with a post natural environment. These projects are designed to let you experiment with ideas, technologies and approaches throughout the semester. I recommend that you choose an issue or point of focus for the project sequence (a species, an issue, a site) so that you are building body of work in this class. After each, you will be asked to write a short reflection on what you learnt, what furthered your thinking and what you were unsatisfied with.
No technical experience is required in this class although experimentation with digital technologies is encouraged. The workshops with introduce or review technologies that might be relevant for each project, but it is possible and potentially more interesting to complete each task without the overuse of computation. What is essential is a willingness to take risks, step our of your daily routines and entangle yourselves with other humans and non-humans who are seeking new perspectives on how we are shaping our world.
Learning Outcomes
Students successfully completing all aspects of this subject will:
- Be introduced to key ideas in environmental humanities and sociology of technology.
- Develop a literacy of local environmental issues.
- Have furthered their experience and skills in negotiating interdisciplinary creative production.
- Have furthered their ability to engage creatively and critically with the social, relational and spatial aspects of urban ecosystems and infrastructures.
Grading
Your grade in this course will be based on the follow breakdown:
- Project 1: 10
- Project 2: 20
- Project 3: 20
- Project 4: 20
- Project 5: 20
- Participation: 10
Grading Policy
Each project will be given a grade out of 5.
- 5: Exceptional effort. Extends brief or shows radical or surprising experimentation. Demonstrates perspective or opinions of the maker and what they wanted to accomplish. Did not let small setbacks (whether conceptual or technical) deter them this end. Well documented.
- 4: Meets expectations. Fulfilled brief and connected with ideas from course content, readings and the world. Explores your interests or ideas from another field of practice.
- 3: Fulfilled the brief but did not connect with ideas in course content and readings. Documentation is poorly executed or incomplete. Phoned it in.
- 2: Did not fulfil the brief or incomplete.
- 1: no submission or over 2 weeks late.
Required Texts
This course will require approximately 20-40 pages of reading per project (approx. every ~3 weeks). All readings are provided as PDFs of NYU Classes and/or website links.
Course Slack
This course makes use of the collaborative team tool Slack, and our Slack site is TBD. All students will be sent an invite on the first day of class. We will use the course Slack to facilitate groupwork, handle some assignment submissions, share links and resources, and to answer questions. We will post assignment sheets on Slack, but all readings will remain on NYU Classes.
Staying in Touch
If you have general questions about an assignment, project or reading, feel free to email us, post the question on Slack in #general, or send a direct message in Slack. Whatever you do, please contact both professors in the message. Please note: we won’t discuss grades or performance over Slack or email. Please come to office hours to discuss, if necessary.
Attendance
Attendance to classes and field trips is mandatory. Unexcused absences will affect your grade. One unexplained absence is allowed; after that, your final, overall, numerical grade will drop by 5 percent (1/2 a grade point (e.g. A to an A-)) for each additional absence. Be on Time. More than 15 minutes late is half an absence.
Contact the professor in advance if you will not be in class (in person or by Slack is preferred).
Missed individual meetings will not be rescheduled; students will have to wait for their next assigned meeting time. In the event a student has little or no progress to show, he/she is still required to attend class.
Moses Statement
If you are student with a disability who is requesting accommodations, please contact New York University’s Moses Center for Students with Disabilities at 212-998-4980 or mosescsd@nyu.edu. You must be registered with CSD to receive accommodations. Information about the Moses Center can be found at www.nyu.edu/csd. The Moses Center is located at 726 Broadway on the 2nd floor.
Diversity and Inclusion
The TCS Department is dedicated to the university’s goals for diversity, equity and inclusion. At the department level, we would like everyone to think about the perspectives present in their current author/book/article list in their syllabi: Are your authors diverse? Do they provide the students with diverse opinions of the topic they are studying? Are their additional authors (people of color, women) who can be added to your list? Please do think about these questions while preparing your final versions for submission.
