teaching

You can find a selection of courses I like to teach below.
For more about my work in the classroom, have a peak here.

Form + Code

This introductory survey explores practices in design and digital media through a series of fast paced workshops, exercises, and creative projects focused on computation and creative coding. While primarily concerned with visual experimentation, composition, and visual communication, projects in this course offer students a range of opportunities to explore parametric and generative design modalities. Critical topics in latter and related approaches to design will be studied through readings, discussion, and student research presentations.

digital projects lab

This intermediate course in computational media and design engages form and process as vital and interdependent lineaments in how we make, distribute and understand digital images, systems, and objects today. Through a series of hands-on projects employing creative software, creative coding, and physical hardware, this course is intended to help students work beyond the basics of digital technique and expand their capacity to better articulate ideas and to craft experiences as makers in our post digital age. Early assignments in this course focus on narrow thematic concerns while a final project of a longer duration addresses a specific problem, scenario, or goal in the latter portion of the term.

DESIGN Studies

This introductory seminar explores the human dimensions of design, technology, and engineering by looking at the ways people understand and relate to objects in our world. Rather than a survey of epochs, styles or movements in the story of design, our task during the semester is to identify the ways the motivations, outcomes, and experiences of design can be read as a function of social and cultural activities. Working thematically, we will study objects both large and small, taking note of how material culture can reflect, respond to, and even shape human behavior, beliefs, ideas, and practices.

Interdisciplinary Project lab

In this interdisciplinary project-based course, students learn to design, build, and present interactive and experiential STEM learning exhibits for public display. Working in collaborative teams, student projects translate big ideas into accessible hands-on learning experiences. Throughout the term, students explore the ways designers and museum professionals collaborate with area experts to craft meaningful and relevant experiences using a range of tools, materials, communication strategies, and media. Our theme takes inspiration from the ways science museums, zoos, gardens, and other institutions strive to develop interactive and engaging environments that promote engagement in fun and exciting ways. Students will apply core principles of design thinking, digital fabrication, composition, and information design to a semester-long collaborative group project.

Reading Global Modernity: World History Since 1400
 

Theodor Adorno’s notorious axiom embodies the driving tension of our work in this course: 

“The Enlightenment has always aimed at liberating men from fear and establishing their sovereignty. Yet the fully enlightened earth radiates disaster triumphant.”

Throughout this course we confront Adorno’s grim warning head-on by asking repeatedly the question: what is modernity? Has it brought enlightenment and progress to all? Or have its achievements created new forms of inequity, violence, and coercion? Setting this question upon a global stage we will consider the ways modernity has been studied, critiqued, and thematized in recent scholarship.

From the sixteenth to the twenty-first century, this course encompasses far reaching geographic and temporal ground. It is in no way a comprehensive survey of modern global history. Instead, we use the subject of modernity as a pivot point around which to spin key topics in humanity’s recent past. The texts driving our study embrace cross-disciplinary and cross-cultural perspectives. Authors taking a decidedly post-colonial perspective assume an important place here. Their work strikes a key note in our song: modernity is neither an exclusively or singular "Western" event. It is the long rumination of modernity in the belly Western historical thought that explains the perennial regurgitation of certain familiar tropes: modern society’s unquenchable search for profit, scientific truth, and political power. But these values belie newly risen evidence that modernity is in fact a heterogeneous, uneven, and historically contingent process. In addition to performing as subjects of power and as objects of study, subaltern agents (colonial subjects, slaves, women, sexual "deviants," and religious minorities, to name a few) are now believed - the audience gasps! - to have played a central role in charting the course of a rather more swarthy, heterogenous, and queer modernity. Indeed, the hybrid nature of our topic reveals numerous modernities, rather than one underway over the last six hundred years.

America in the Modern World: 1865-NOW

This seminar examines important shifts in American culture and society after the Civil War. In search of a recognizably “modern” America, we discuss how phenomena including Reconstruction, suffrage, global war, and the Depression shaped the country we live in today. In these years the criteria of what constituted a citizen, a worker, a student, and a consumer became tied up with global movements and dreams of progress helped define America's assent to global power. The rising commercial, military, and cultural power enlarged the nation's obligations to the world and helped it define a larger global modernity. We will study the relationships between rural and urban American; consider how industrial, scientific, and environmental paradigms generate and destabilize economic, political and legal systems; ask how Antebellum America was exchanged for new hierarchies that privileged capital and technology; and discuss how cultures of consumption, labor, race, and gender are tied up with the "American dream.”