Unravel complex systems and visualize their interactions. Experiment and reimagine them through interventions, algorithms, models, and simulations. Communicate your understanding through powerful system visualizations.

Ethics comes up when things go down. Explore ethical theories to reflect upon what we design and why. Use speculative design to envision the unexpected consequences of new technology. Learn how to create experiences that bring to life ethical theories.

Learn the process and methods to uncover people’s needs, opinions, and behaviors, and apply them to drive the development of successful products and services. People-centered research provides the hands-on skills to help you understand people’s opinions, behaviors, expectations, and goals for using a product or service, and how to apply these skills with empathy, honesty, and pragmatism.

Storytelling is an extremely important skill for designers and researchers to master. This workshop will teach key storytelling strategies and techniques used in a variety of media, including fiction, non-fiction, film, art, and design; and show how to apply them to interaction design through a series of discussions and exercises.

We live in uncertain times. The favorable climate that humanity has known is rapidly changing, with far-reaching implications for human behavior and health. It’s increasingly critical to build preparedness for direct – and indirect – climate impacts and to welcome uncertainty into the design process. How do we explore and imagine possible pathways to increase our resilience and capacity to adapt? This workshop will explore these questions and help build an understanding of the trajectories, impacts, and influences of climate change.

The art of emulating life: design across biological scales! This course involves an active search and a responsive foresight; it does not involve extracting from nature, it implies learning from it. Human beings are not simply observers of nature, as if we were looking at it from a bubble. We are 100% in nature.

Explore the nature and aesthetics of interaction design. Practice creativity in a hands-on studio environment. This five-day workshop focuses on interaction design foundations, history, critique, aesthetics, and contemporary issues in a studio environment. It provides a great intro to new practitioners as well as an in-depth exploration of interaction design foundations for experienced designers.