Whether we live in rural or urban settings, we often rely on many centralized systems for the fulfillment of most of our basic needs including energy, communication, healthcare, and food (among others). In times of crisis, these centralized systems encounter innumerable points of failure while their infrastructure struggles to adapt to the changes. So what can we do?
In this course we will explore open challenges and flexible ways to respond to and prepare for real-world disruptions such as, but not limited to:
- When the power grid goes down: can you adapt readily available technologies to harvest energy?
- After a major climate-related event, when streets flood impeding transportation and access: can you map hyper-local flooding and share that information with the community to reroute travel or avoid sewage contaminants?
- When the food supply chain is disrupted due to power outages, storms or pandemics: what are the urban farming and foraging opportunities in your local area? Can you grow and preserve your own food in the face of limited power and refrigeration?
- When a storm disrupts the wireless networks we rely so heavily on for communication, can we leverage other techniques, other frequencies and bandwidths to still share messages across our communities?
This is a “choose-your-own-adventure” course that merges citizen science, physical computing and design research and aims at reframing resource constraints and disruptions as opportunities to re-think, re-claim and re-imagine our futures. The course is organized around four main topic areas based on real-world scenarios which will introduce tools and methods around food growing and preservation, wireless networking and connectivity, energy production and harvesting, citizen science and environmental sensing. The modules will include expert lectures, hands-on workshops, and demos as well as in-person or virtual field trips to get to know local Community-Based Organizations (CBOs) actively working on resilience-building initiatives.
Students will work in small groups as well as individually to respond to design briefs and specific scenarios and their constraints through a series of short assignments. This course aims to create a learning community inside and outside of the classroom where together we will experiment with collaboratively imagining and designing resilient, decentralized systems as alternatives to more centralized infrastructures. This course hopes to promote resourcefulness and a deeper understanding of systems’ interdependencies to foster creative problem-solving while empowering learners to contribute to the resiliency of their very own communities in the face of uncertainty and change.