Assignment: research-by-design project ‘Critical Urban Interface’

In teams of 3 people, you will work on conceptualizing a critical urban interface that engages with one or more of the issues brought up and discussed during class. During each class, we will do a series of iterative research-by-design workshop sessions aimed at developing your team project. Teams are expected to continue working on their joint project during non-class hours.While developing your project, think about the following aspects:

• Critical: your project departs from an existing urban interface and subverts the dominant logics of most (urban) interfaces aimed at optimizing, efficiency, control, and so on.
• Speculative: your project opens up alternative perspectives on possible urban futures; it asks the question “what if?”.
• Participatory: your project should give citizens or even non-human actors a voice to speak and engage with the urban environment and/or a particular issue.
• Relational: your project connects one or more different worlds: e.g. more-than-human.
• Frictional: your concept is ambiguous, provocative, and draws attention to itself (reflexive).

Winning student Team: Welcome to the Ü-HOOD!

Student teams could send in their proposal to the Media Architecture Biennale 2020 Student Award.

One of the teams won the Award in the category “More-Than-Human Cities” with their project Welcome to the Ü-HOOD! Winning Team members were Media, Art and Performance students: Andrej Antonic, Bernice Ong, Wenqing Xia.