PJ Dick Innovation Fund Teaching Grant: [Velocity as Frame] Mobility as Access
Buckminster Fuller's Dymaxion Projection from “Fluid Geography,” 1946.
[Velocity as Frame] Mobility as Access
Instructor: Gloria Chang, Special Faculty, Carnegie Mellon Architecture & Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE CMU)
This course investigates mobility as a spatial, political, and infrastructural condition by examining how velocity is understood as the capacity, rate, and permission to move, and structures access, autonomy, and power across the built environment. Through a three-phase sequence that moves from embodied performance to digital capture to urban-scale analysis, students develop a layered understanding of how movement is designed, granted, or constrained. The course pairs full-scale experimentation, performance art-based precedents, and unfolded section techniques at contrasting scales with research in accessibility, code, and contemporary mobility studies. This studio operates in parallel with ECE’s mobility-focused project lab, enabling students to generate a translatable awareness of movement into interventions that respond to gradients of access and the lived realities of highly diverse users. The semester culminates in designed, critical, projective work representative of how velocity, mobility, and spatial agency may be constructed and taught across disciplinary boundaries.
Image: Buckminster Fuller's Dymaxion Projection from “Fluid Geography,” 1946.
About the Project Lead
Special Faculty
-
Established in 2023 by PJ Dick Trumbull Lindy Group, the Faculty Grants Program will award a total of $400,000 over four years beginning in 2024. The program supports faculty research and teaching innovations that address the School’s three pedagogical challenges of climate change, social justice and artificial intelligence. The proposals were assessed on their impact in furthering a faculty member’s research and teaching, their contribution to interrogating the School’s challenges, and their viability to garner further research support, make an impact on the discipline and expand the pedagogy of the School.