Design for Emerging Technologies

The rapid pace of technological change has transformed the conceptual boundaries between the traditional design disciplines, especially with respect to emerging technologies. New transdisciplinary design endeavors are appearing, such as human-computer interface design, physical interaction design, network design, information architecture, and design for embedded control and robotic activation. Students who work in this newly charted area benefit from faculty members who are part of the School's design initiative, drawn from interior architecture, designed objects, and visual communications and from collaboration with the long-established faculty of the art and technology department.

Beyond simply using new technologies, students studying design with emerging technologies reflexively and critically focus on their impact, exploring the underlying methodological and social, political, and cultural issues brought to light by the use of emerging technologies. Current faculty research includes the use of processes such as simulation techniques, the interaction of electronic and physical forms of modeling, rapid prototyping, robotics, networked embedded microcontrollers, and high-level interaction scripting languages, as well as work in the critical foundations of new technologies and their design implications. The aim of this new area is to bring these areas together in the form of interdisciplinary experimental laboratory focused on critically and creatively exploring the possibilities and implications opened by emergent and evolving technologies in design.

Applicants will be drawn from traditional design disciplines such as architecture, industrial design, and interior design. but also from industry and practice and the creative arts in general. What they will have in common is a wish to work in the fertile terrain between disciplines and practices and the most rapidly evolving technologies.