Course Info: CSI-0241

Spring semester of this yearlong course was a project-based semester with students working in collaborative interdisciplinary teams (with the fall course as a prerequisite) to develop research-based design proposals across multiple scales. The projects included developing a land use plan/master plan, developing building designs that seem most relevant to the local people, and possibly developing smaller-scale design projects as needed - all of these projects were informed by and integrated research related to the cultural, social, and/or ecological issues from Nan Province, Thailand. By the end of the semester, each project team produced a series of drawings as well as a project research paper that presented the design projects within the context of the research questions most pressing to each team. Students represented their disciplines of study as "experts" within each team, and teams shared information and research. Class time was spent discussing the larger contexts of the projects with both student and faculty presentations and in-studio working sessions with critiques, pin-ups and reviews of the design proposals and reports. Students worked in teams and individually on specific projects targeted towards understanding and dealing with problems identified by our collaborators at Joko Community Learning Center in Nan Province. While sharing and critiquing each others’ work, design students spent the semester in studio fashion creating design projects for the Joko site. Anthropology and ecology students conducted research on topics of their choosing that related to the issues Joko faces and that could inform the design projects. All students contributed to developing a sustainability matrix related to their projects. In teams, the students researched and wrote practice grant proposals related to their design projects.