CALL FOR ESSAYS!

The MITarchA Committee on Design proposes an exciting new initiative to the Department of Architecture alumni: a request for dialogue to acknowledge and share our collective thoughts on how we design. The initiative will elicit responses on the present and future State of MIT Design: how MIT Course 4 alumni are especially equipped to answer the emergent challenges of this century in our work, in our lives, in our teaching and in our unique approach to the design professions. Our initiative seeks alumni to respond to leading issues in design which will focus not only on how unique MIT education is in the field of design, but how we see the role of design for an interrelated future and the evolution of a changing world. Please share your thoughts with us by responding to one or more of the following three design topics in essays of no more than 200 words per topic by September 7, 2023 September 21, 2023 DEADLINE EXTENDED!

Essays received will be presented to students and alumni during the annual MIT Alumni Leadership Conference starting on September 28th. Over pizza and drinks we look forward to an informal dialogue among students and alumni about the critical role of design today, including what students hope to learn from alumni and MIT led design from around the world.

Our in-person event will be held on Thursday September 28 at 5:00 PM ET in Room 09-451 on the MIT campus in Cambridge. We encourage students attending the conference to join this design focused event. Alumni are also welcome to join in-person or virtually. More information will become available for virtual attendance.

Following the ALC event, we will continue our dialogue on the State of MIT Design with a series of roundtable sessions planned in 2024, at which both MIT architects and design thought-leaders will be invited to participate. More information on the 2024 Roundtables will become available this fall.

Please review below topics for essay submissions to the State of MIT Design. Thank you!

TOPICS + TRAJECTORY

Three major topics are presented below with critical sub-topics to further delineate the focus of the essay responses. Although the topics noted are derived from a variety of issues that conjure “how we design”, certain themes evolved through committee discussion and analysis. We invite you to continue this discourse within the three Topics and have added a fourth “Open Topic” if this is preferred.

1. ENVIRONMENT

Global – Climate and Resilience Design

Regional and City Constructs / Urban Design

Real Space / Virtual Space Contexts

2 IDEATION

Interdisciplinary Design Constructs

Educational Arenas

Inquiry + Research Platforms

3 PRACTICE AND TECHNOLOGY

Inclusion and Equity

Business + Design Value

AI and Design Technology

4. OPEN TOPIC

ACTION:

Format: 200-word maximum essay submitted in PDF format.

Inclusions: MIT Class Year and Degree Program; 1 Image maximum of your work or an image that reflects design in JPEG format.

Timeframe: Essays are to be emailed to mitdesign.mitarcha23 [at] gmail.com by 11:59PM ET September 21, 2023

QUESTIONS? Please contact MITArchA Committee on Design.

Meaning and Importance of Design

by Andrea Lamberti BSAD ‘91

Design begins with the synthesis of systems and form in response to a set of issues, clarifying them in the process. And when our response yields space for human occupation, or when it fosters engagement of form with the human body, the opportunity for creating architecture is born. In so doing, architecture also takes on the responsibility to serve not just “the human body” but a larger collective, or “the public.”  Through serving humanity, architecture – and therefore design – remains of paramount importance to society today, not only in terms of shelter but in order to inspire, facilitate and support activities that advance what we might think of as the common good and our total well-being. 

Spaces for scientific inquiry

Thomas Edison Research Lab

Spaces for transportation, gathering and culture

Train Hall

Concert Hall

Spaces for care and wellness

Operating Theater

Spaces for living

Villa Savoye

This recognition of the importance of design is not sufficient for our purpose as professionals, teachers, thought leaders, makers, designers and architects. We need to work to ensure that design – both its output and the process to achieve it - reaches all populations equitably, and that we conduct our work with bold awareness of ecological and health impacts in order to steward outcomes for the planet as well as the life it sustains in a positive direction.

Planet Earth

Humanity

Needs and Wants

Alejandro Aravena housing project

by Jose Guillermo Frontado, MArchAS’80

Co-President MITArchA

Design is an iterative process of discovery and ideation, of divergent (outside the box) and convergent (zooming and focusing) thinking, of defining goals and identifying constraints, of diagnosis and prognosis, by which something (a thing) is created.

It is a process with theory, knowledge and values. It can be a positivist rational problem solving process, or a constructionist process of reflection in action. 

As an idea or as an object, the nature of such “something (a thing)” is the result of an endeavor resulting from a need or a want.

If it is a need, then the process will make emphasis on efficiency, stability, objectivity, and pertinence.        

Oil Platform

If it is a want, then the process will make emphasis on transformation, aesthetics, and impertinence.

Vladimir Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International

MIT design education has been a process of creating sensible solutions by means of a systematic questioning of conventional trends, with the intention of transforming a social or an operational situation while creating value and legitimacy.  

In learning to work out wants. In learning to go beyond needs, lies the sense of professional and personal fulfillment we find while developing design solutions in many different areas or roles. And then and only then, we can address the challenge of making a better world. 

From Wikipedia: 

A need is dissatisfaction at a point of time and in a given context.[1] Needs are distinguished from wants …… the concept of "unmet need" arises in relation to needs in a social context, which are not being fulfilled.[2] ………. a need is something required for a safe, stable and healthy life……. a want is a desire, wish or aspiration…….the idea of want can be examined from many perspectives. In secular societies want might be considered similar to the emotion desire…

State of MIT Design: How do we design?

by Michael Joyce, MArch ‘91

Design thinking has often been a mysterious process that I find is a comfortable and yet complex place to inhabit. By nature, design is part of the human condition that defines our progress through the ages and inspires our push to innovate.  Looking back at my time at MIT-SAP, and now as a member of MITArchA, I have recently wondered how MIT trained architects are wired in a way that is outside the traditional educational path. Do we see things a little differently from our design colleagues and is the search across transdisciplinary lines perhaps our significant creative process? Or maybe it’s simply just an insatiable curiosity… and one that will not “Kill the cat”.

At MIT, we did not hear the word ‘design’ often. Rather, we often heard meanings such as the process, or the transformation of place or perhaps the issues of continuity and the variations of form. It was as if we were able to peel away the layers of the word Design, its multiple meanings and dig deeper into an essential knowledge of design space. Before my time at MIT these terms were unknown yet eventually appealed to me. Discussing the contours of design at MIT was at times challenging, but always interesting and intellectually rewarding. Above all, it was about seeing the larger realm towards how we inhabit both space and time versus the short fleeting object or glorified moment. In other words, design through the lens of MIT was always “moving”; a pliable medium working continuously in a changing and flexible world. Above all it is always grounded in the built condition, the culture of the site and about bringing focus to habitation and community. These are the domains I hold close to me and that nourish my design process.

Western New York Welcome Center, Buffalo, NY

What informs my own architectural approach, and my design thinking is a sort of balance between the deliberate and the visceral. In the process of making, which I can say is partially informed by early formative years with my father (who was a builder), there is the state of what it wants to become -the Idea coalescent with how it wants to become-the Construct. One is not more primary than the other yet both have a reciprocal interface that fires the engine of architecture. Like John Berger’s “Ways of Seeing”, I find intuitive connections in the act of observation; the structure within nature, beautifully designed assemblies, writing, music, photography and eventually architecture- these are the makings of the design apparatus. 

Lisbon Street

In architecture there is a struggle to design within constant challenges from the issues of the site to the program, structural support, life-safety, societal equity, budgets, and climatic responsibility to name just a few. Yet it is within these challenges and finding the associations that one can truly find the opportunity to conceive the vision that inspires.

Architecture and design can be defined by some as a “product”.  However, the architectural product within a design state is not an immediate offering but rather an integrated device to its often-changing context, the ephemeral reading of site and especially how we inhabit place and serve humanity. There is a concern when such a product strays from the essential purposes of shelter, community, and a timeless value to serve function and beauty over time. Design is both a constant and a variable. 

Design then indeed has the stamp of humanity – where we dare to dream and conjure new inclusive and flexible environments. Its very essence is to be human, to understand how to create the contexts that serve our needs and our desires for an improved world.  At MIT, I found a beginning not an end to what design means, where architecture seeks a balance of the deliberate and the visceral. 

How do we design? The answer is still being built. 

J Michael Ruane Trial Courts, Salem, MA