Course: “Design & Power”
University of Michigan, Winter 2017
Department of Anthropology / Taubman School of Architecture
Designs are both outcomes and agents of power. Planned spaces, the built environment, and designed technologies can act as implements to structure domination, but they also offer powerful tools with the potential to address and undermine inequalities. In this course, students of anthropology and architecture will together to develop a vocabulary to describe power in its many forms. Through short ethnographic projects of research/design, students will engage with problems that arise in projects that take culture and society not simply as contexts for design or analysis, but as targets of positive intervention.
