Bizarre Details: stories of the ordinary, the uncanny, and the architectural comic

This design research seminar pinpoints the architectural and urban detail as a point of departure to understanding socio-ecological systems in the worlds around us. While the conventional “detail” in architecture and urban design normalizes professional values, we will look to the mundane to nurture a critical appreciation of material culture, landscapes, and people. As a research family we will dwell into theories of informality and in turn produce a series of experimentations around fabrication, aesthetics, and precarities that challenges conventional architectural order in favor of storytelling, ethnographies, and ecological resistances.

Through a series of tutorials we engage in our worlds as a laboratory to develop a research project that merges design into a critical praxis around socio-ecological justice. We will use this as a vehicle to uncover ideas to develop comic prototypes that aim to recalibrate the ethics of fieldwork, research, and dissemination. As part of the research family we will dwell with tools in animation (Photoshop, After Effects and Blender Grease Pencil), fabrication, and ethnographies. Our journey into oddities and the bizarre will curate a volume of sketchbooks, mock-ups, and interactive comics which will be showcased at the end of the semester in conversation with theorists, artists, and designers.