co-taught with Anastasiia Raina
Making Kin With Biomaterials - FA21, Tech Elective, Columbia GSAPP
The realm of the tiny and invisible has actively been ignored within modern societies, despite or exactly because modern science found out more and more about our mutual relations and dependencies with microorganisms, fungi, and other non-human species. Only recently, this situation has started to change. New scientific, computational, philosophical, and evolutionary approaches emphasize the decisive role of the microbiome in the development and maintenance of complex life-forms. In the pyramid of organic life, microorganisms not only lay the foundation but by far represent the largest part, both in numbers and in volume or weight.
With the dawning of the carbon-based period of modernity and the realization of the environmental costs that are going along with it, biological agents and materials have received a major upgrade in public recognition. Being it for substitution of carbon-based building materials or fuels, being it as a means to clean up the petromodern mess, or being it as the basis for entirely new regimes of nutrition, transport, and living, nowadays’ future scenarios are full of visions for newly envisioned uses of or, rather, collaborations with microorganisms.
This course aims to theoretically and practically investigate and reveal these mutual relationships and multispecies collaborations across all scales. Students will interrogate different approaches of industrial production, conceptualize and materialize objects that propose alternative approaches and situate these artifacts within the speculative frameworks and future developments. We will be designing prototypes for interfacing with biological systems in the form of grown materials, bioreactors, sampling instruments, or bio-receptive substrates. Students will have the chance to present work-in-progress prototypes and scenarios in a public forum at our partner and project space 1014 within the framework of a series of workshops to embody and imagine life in a post-carbon society.
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Public program and series of pre-enactment salons:
Precognitioning post-oil
What might it feel like to live in New York City after fossil fuels?
The fossil energy regime of coal, oil and gas has to and will end eventually, coal rolling and the renewed celebration of excessive fossil fuel consumption have been merely petromelancholic rebound effects… This is the backdrop for our ongoing research project on the histories and afterlives of petromodernity. How do we want to live in a post-fossil future? How and with whom will we develop new kinships after the social bonds connected to the resource economy and the exuberant promises of our ‘Western Way of Life’ are untied? Will we actively delve into a world of living materials and microbiological entanglements? Will we get beyond racism and patriarchy? Will we cease to privately own land?
Join us at one of three successive precognitioning sessions at 1014! Play out visions of urban renewal, societal reformation, and a post-extractivist approach towards natures and societies after the possible endings of fossil energy regimes.
Through narrative techniques and design futures methods a series of bespoke design interventions and immersive installations transform 1014 into a hyper-reality testing environment. Using guided speculative role play and co-created moments of immersion, participants are encouraged to experiment with new values and beliefs that might emerge in a post-petro world. The scenarios and installations have been developed in collaboration with an architecture course at Columbia Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, led by participatory futures practitioner Chris Woebken in partnership with cultural researcher Alexander Klose.
The idea of precognition: Being neither driven by big corporations nor by governments, the precognition process takes up the project of working with and on futures in an explicitly non-technocratic, experimental way. It avoids statistics-based "scientific" methodologies. Instead, it relies on collectively crafted visions and material-based artifacts and embodied roleplay. An archeology of the fossil presence: surveying infrastructures, collecting images and narratives that at the same time manifest all kinds of afterlives and hint to possible escape routes.
You’re invited to join us as a participant on one of the evenings Oct 28, Oct 29, Oct 30. In two groups of max 15 people, visitors will walk through the installations and the precognitioning process accompanied by Alexander Klose and Chris Woebken and different ‘lead speculators’ from varying fields of practice and knowledge for each evening. We will explore and respond to new precognitioned values, myths, and cultural imaginations that might emerge while being shaped by the afterlives of petro-modernity.
Commissioned and hosted by 1014, New York City, in cooperation with Goethe Institute New York City and Popup Goethe Institute Houston.
Find more information on our lead speculators here:
https://www.1014.nyc/events/precognitioning-post-oil-hjrjl
Scenes from the sessions at 1014 and collages by Adeline Chum, Jules Kleitman, Aditi Mangesh Shetye, 2021
Critical Thinking & Experimental Processes - FA19 at RISD MID
Grad studio taught by Paolo Cardini, Agi Haines, Chris Woebken
In this course, we will focus on areas of the design discipline that treat design not as a vocational tool for developing products that solve problems, but rather as a practice of critical inquiry. What does this mean? Historically, Industrial Design has been tightly coupled with industry and commerce, with designers designing functional products that improves people's lives, and more importantly, sells! Sustainable design, social design and various other approaches within design have tried to make the products of Industrial Design less harmful. However, design as critical inquiry is different from all these approaches, in that it attempts to use design to question and reveal the underlying assumptions of the systems in which we operate as designers, but also as citizens, humans, animals. This approach to design is variously known as critical design, speculative design, discursive design. Interestingly, Critical Design itself has been critiqued as being not sufficiently radical. Industrial Design has also traditionally been seen and presented itself as a somewhat logical and goal-driven process of problem-solving. We will also be turning this aspect of traditional design on its head, and use design as an experimental process, non-goal driven, open-ended yet iterative. We can refer to this as Experimental Design. The word ‘experimental’ is tricky, however, because it can refer to two quite different, almost opposite things: tightly controlled experiments as conducted in the sciences, or experimental inspiration-seeking activity in the fine arts. In this course, we will tend toward the latter meaning.
So: Experimentation and Critical Inquiry are the two fundamental elements of this studio class. We will learn about these approaches in design, but more importantly, through their research and making, students will be invited to discover the unknown and ask relevant and pointed questions.
Yuqing Ma - Slow Food
Danlei Huang - Post Plastic Age
WenYu Du - Exit Plan
Cross-Species Test Sites - SS19 & FA19 at Columbia GSAPP
Building Science & Technology Elective
Taught by Chris Woebken
This course investigates the complex relationships between humans and non-human urban inhabitants. Students study urban animal wildlife, indicator species, and microbial communities and work with biologists and ecologists to identify new potentials in designing for biological systems. Through the process of fabricating, situating and testing prototypes, we aim to create a reflective space for deeply considering the details of these new interactions, and to discover unforeseen opportunities, twists and challenges. Project outcomes are physical devices in the form of multispecies interfaces, bio-receptive materials, and infrastructure modifications that propose new multispecies collaborations across all scales.
Full Syllabus
Jules Kleitmann | FA19
Xin Qin | Good Fences Make Good Neighbors, FA19
Michael Alexander Mc Dowell | Seahorse Exchange, SS19
Matteo Cordera - Ratelier, SS19
Michael Lu - Raptor Vending Machine, SS19
Sadie Dempsey, Recolonizing, SS19
Micro-Environment Exploration Lab - SS18 at NYU Tandon - IDM
Taught by Elizabeth Hénaff and Chris Woebken
Metagenomics is the field of research which investigates the microbial component of our environment. It is a rapidly growing field, enabled by the recent decrease in cost and increase in throughput of DNA sequencing technology. We can now easily measure the microbial component of our environment and have the opportunity to incorporate this new microbial metric into the design of our built environments and products. In this class we will cover a basic understanding of the state of current research in environmental microbiomes. Students will get hands-on experience in which they will learn the computational methods to analyze genomic data. We will design physical devices to interact with this invisible component of our environment, either in form of sampling instruments, bioreactors or bio receptive substrates that propose new symbiotic relationships with the microbial environment.
Full Syllabus
The projects presented at Biodesign Challenge: https://biodesignchallenge.org/nyu-idm
Weather Worlds at UNFCCC COP24 - Fall 18 at NYU ITP/IMA
Taught by Karolina Sobecka and Chris Woebken
Weather Worlds is a studio course that explores the role that design plays in public engagement on climate disruption. In this outcome-focused course the students will design pop-up public engagement interventions for the 24th Session of the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC COP24), which will take place in December 2018 in Katowice, Poland. The designs will be created in consultation with Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre. The aim is to create blueprints for design approaches that can be adapted and replayed in different contexts and settings to create interventions sensitive to and inclusive of local challenges and participation. A handoff that includes a local re-interpretation of the design is a key aspect of this approach.
In this semester’s Weather Worlds studio we will focus on the impacts of climate change on food systems and vice versa - on the impact of our food systems on climate. We will design interventions through which participants confront how by simply eating they connect to supply chains, networks, and institutions that extend well beyond their families, communities or countries. Specifically the interventions will connect the international COP conference participants with the local polish food-system-and-climate-impact intersections. Understanding the paths that the carbon we ingest takes through the myriad material configurations and their sociotechnical orderings exposes the fundamental interconnections between the matter of our bodies, carbon emissions impacts on climate, and the agricultural, infrastructural, consumption, valuation and information systems that we have put in place. It further lets us consider what can be done about it, from local context-specific issues to global policy.
The partnership with the humanitarian sector will broaden and amplify the impact of this project, facilitating and developing engagements worldwide. This course produces a Weather Worlds platform that will investigate forms of experimental pedagogy, communication, and participation in engaging the public and multiple stakeholders on issues linked to climate disruption.
Full Syllabus
Camera Hacking - Night school, 2011
On November 30, 2011 Media artist Kyle McDonald and speculative designer Chris Woebken ran a Night school at Studio-x demonstrating a series of experiments using time-lapse, photo traps, and computer face-detection to reveal hidden perspectives, invisible behaviors, and unexpected interactions in the city.
