ARCH-770B - The incredible weirdness of making: How Do We Do?

3 Credits

This course focuses on the complex relationships between culture and technology as two critical areas of influence on human "making." Looking from present to past, students use the Industrial Revolutions and the institutionalization and dissemination of expertise as a framework to understand shifts in values intimately related to the emergence of new technologies that span the physical, biological and digital worlds. They combine and reinforce one another in ways driven by contemporary culture and, at the same time, affect how contemporary culture is formed. The course operates trans-historically and trans- geographically, ranging from how the Katana Samurai Sword is made to how the Kuka Robotic Arm makes. Moving between technologies, artifacts, materials, processes, and meanings, we will ask: How do we do? - with the "we" increasingly involving intricate human-non-human collaboration.