playground, the center for transdisciplinarity, design and innovation at Habib University invites you to a series of two workshops with Ahmed Ansari, a visiting scholar from Carnegie Mellon University.

1. Uncovering Design Ecologies: Thinking in Systems

Every Tuesday & Thursday, June 19 till July 19
9:00am - 12pm
playground, Habib University
Course Fee: Rs10,000/- for the entire course. You are requested to visit playground on June 19 at 8.45 am to pay the course fee.

Unlike simple problems like figuring out how to debug and optimize a piece of code or designing an aesthetically pleasing, useful and usable product, wicked problems, like rising inner city crime, rural to urban flight, or the poor quality of lower education, require developing a different kind of mindset and expertise that can deal with the scale, intricacy, and interconnectedness of these problems. As the distinctions between the natural world, built environment, and culture and society become increasingly blurry, and as the role of designers expands from dealing with straightforward, simple problems to tackling larger systemic issues, we can also no longer talk about design outside of its role in determining the shape and form of complex systems, models of aspects of the world that can explicate and guide intentional, planned change.

This course intends to introduce participants to concepts, approaches and methods in applied systems and complexity theory. We will explore different ways of observing, analyzing, and describing socio-technical systems, with a view to then being able to determine where best to intervene in them, and determine what the nature of those interventions, whether they are artifacts, services, experiences, environments or platforms, should be. This course will be divided into two components for every session: a lecture on key concepts and subsequent discussion, followed by hands on exercises where participants will put their newly acquired knowledge to work. By the end of this course, participants should have developed an appreciation for the value of systems thinking, a better sense of how to create rich and useful visualizations and models of systemic phenomenon, where and how to design interventions to tackle wicked problems, and be in a better position to gauge the efficacy of, and take responsibility for, the consequences of their designed actions.

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2. Research through Making: Practice-Based Research in Design


Every Tuesday & Thursday, June 19 till July 19
1:30 - 4:30pm
playground, Habib University
Course Fee: Rs10,000/- for the entire course.You are requested to visit playground on June 19 at 1.15 pm to pay the course fee.

One of the distinctive characteristics of research in design is that designers not only employ a large variety of frameworks, tools and methods borrowed from the social sciences in order to do research, but that they design and deploy material things, whether artifacts, environments or experiences, in order to construct and test hypotheses and interrogate and understand lived human experience and the structure of everyday life. This distinction between research that one does in order to design, versus research driven by and through design practice, shall be our point of departure for this course.

Apart from developing an understanding of the diverse landscape of research of, for, and by design, we will learn how to design artefactually-driven research experiments, making prototypes and simulations to investigate human behavior across space and time. While our time in each session will be mostly dedicated to lectures and discussions, participants should be expected to dedicate time outside of class to collaborate with colleagues in developing and deploying their tools and conducting their research studies. By the end of the course participants will be expected to have grown an understanding of how qualitative methods from a number of disciplinary domains such as sensory anthropology, media studies, interrogative art practice, and human-computer interaction can be modified and used by designers, developed a proficiency in creating entirely new methods, practices and tools, and acquired some skill in being able to collate, analyze and present important findings and insights.


About the Instructor:
Ahmed Ansari is a doctoral candidate in Design Studies at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU). His research interests intersect at the junction between design history and theory, post\decolonial theory, and the philosophy of technology, exploring the possibilities of non-western philosophies of technology as the basis for the development of new forms of design practice, with a focus on the Indian subcontinent and late Vedic philosophical thought. He is also a founding member of the Decolonizing Design platform, from which he does frequent and fervent critiques of the politics and ethics of contemporary design practice. He teaches both studio and seminar courses in systems thinking, cultural theory, research methods, and design studies in the School of Design at CMU.