The need to address climate change and national security by transitioning to clean energy is central to current efforts at the international, national, and state levels. Our main studio project engages with NYS’s Reforming the Energy Vision (REV) initiative and energy community collaborators to identify opportunities to meet REV's goals within central Syracuse.
Plans like REV are often composed of goals that are too large, too abstract, or too vague to direct individual projects, while the clean energy industry is dominated by technical detail, frequently at the scale of electrical circuits. In this project, we explore the middle ground, uniting broad goals with practicalities through urban design. In this era of great reluctance to invest in large public projects, tying small, implementable designs to overarching goals becomes an essential skill to enable change, one step at a time. In the process we will apply design thinking to one of the most urgent issues of our time. More information here. How can design in urban environments capitalize on the transition from fossil fuels to clean energy to improve life for all residents?
Studio|Next: Building the Post-Carbon City
Postindustrial cities currently face the challenge of climate change, failing infrastructure, and technological innovation. This wicked problem demands practical visions characterized by innovation and synthesis: aka design thinking. Emerging designers need to embrace these challenges as well, because these challenges will define the next decades of careers in environmental design.
This special Visiting Critic studio focuses on the current moment of action on clean energy at the federal, state, and local levels to make the postindustrial city a better place for people. This studio targets students’ skills as professionals and peers, building confidence by applying design and technical skills to unconventional problems, and employing digital and virtual tools in these pursuits. For more information, see here, posts on the blog City Wild, and #citybynext.