Advanced Option Studio (AOS): Salvaged Futures - Unmaking Intelligent Spaces
Students will investigate the wasteful worlds we've created through technology and position alternatives. Students will get to know repair’s relationship to forced obsolesce and corporate ownership of repair. They’ll also get close to repair and develop their own repair manual by spending time hands-on repairing, mending or tending to something in their world. In tandem, they’ll study sites in the world affected by electronic waste.
UN-Earthed Networks. Siddhant Salvi. Waste Machines ASO F24.
AOS Catalog Course Description
The greenest buildings in the world still rely on short-lived electronics — producing a hidden stream of waste that rivals their own structural footprint. Cities are racing to become "smart," but have no plan for the e-waste graveyards these technologies will create. In the previous iterations, the studio has focused on unmaking waste as a way to counter and resist unsustainable practices in technology: obsolesces, device abandonment, data consumption, and more besides. In this final iteration, we focus less on the technological matter and more on repairing the worlds that they have created. Students are invited to consider maintenance, care and repair as a way to explore alternatives for our relationships to technology and the critical stances we should take on the plethora of sustainability concerns they create for us.