ID/GD 4545—Design for the Anthropocene

Industrial Design, Graphic Design, Landscape Architecture, and Brown students confront core questions about how we organize our society and the institutions that make it. What are the roles, norms, values, that will enable humanity to flourish?

This course occurred between phases 1 and 2 of the Horizon 2045 partnership. While our work in phase 1 was focused on nuclear security in specific, our work in phase 2 was going to expand the question. CfC’s contribution to phase 2 was to lead a research effort that asked what kind of institutions could enable human civilization to stop self-generating catastrophic and existential threats — since the current set of institutions seem to be hellbent on creating them. Experts in nuclear policy, climate change, bureaucracy design, and others served as visiting critics, and students attended the Collapse symposium as part of the course, drawing inspiration from RISD faculty and staff artworks and the rich set of panels and workshops to kick off their experimentation. The outcomes in turn informed our phase 2 proposals and the briefings for our two Planetary Objects studios.

Fall 2022 — 3 Credit Studio

Faculty
Justin Cook Tim Maly

Partners
Horizon 2045
10×100
Politics for Tomorrow
Creative Bureaucracy Festival