Crisis Modes : Protocols + Future Ecologies | NYC | August 2009

Crisis Modes is a one-week intensive design workshop to be held in New York City from August 17-21.

The workshop will take place in a studio setting and will be devoted to exploring relational design strategies and digital design methodologies for speculative infrastructures. New York City, with its breadth of ecological and urban complexity and in particular its urbanizing industrialized waterways, will be the primary context explored.

The aim of the workshop will be to empower designers to negotiate the complex and data-rich environments that are available through professional mapping and information systems and to develop speculative design proposals through the use of computational techniques and methodologies. Participants will develop design interventions that address emerging ecological crises and opportunities found in New York ecologies of the present and near-future.

The format of the workshop will include daily intensive workshop sessions focusing primarily on Grasshopper, Rhino’s parametric design plug-in, and evening lectures and presentations from practitioners and experts in the fields of sustainability and computational design. The workshop will cover strategic workflows for data set analysis and mapping, complex rule-based geometries, as well as techniques for digital fabrication.

The instructors of the workshop are Michael Chen + Jason Lee [Crisis Fronts], & Ronnie Parsons + Gil Akos [Studio Mode | modeLab]. They have taught design studios, seminars, and workshops at institutions throughout North America, including California College of the Arts, Columbia University, Cooper Union, Cornell University, Pratt Institute, Princeton University, Stevens Institute, and University of Toronto.

The workshop will culminate in a public exhibition and opening event on the evening of Friday, August 21.

All interested students and professionals are encouraged to attend. All experience levels are welcome. For more information, please visit the modeLab Participate page.