This week at GSAPP, lectures and conversations examine design as a civic, technological, and speculative practice. Across urban transformation, computational creativity, future imaginaries, and street design, speakers share approaches that reshape how we understand and design the world.

Matias Echanove ‘03 M.S.UP is an urbanologist and author with over 20 years of practice spanning Europe, Asia, and Latin America. He is a co-founder of urbz, a research-action collective with offices in Mumbai, Bogotá, Paris, and Geneva. His work centers on urban transformation through citizen participation.

The lecture is moderated by Director of MSAUD Neeraj Bhatia (GSAPP, The Open Workshop).

Tiffany Tseng (Barnard College) develops design tools that empower beginners to realize their creative potential. Her work combines systems building and design-based research; in interdisciplinary teams, she designs and builds software tools and collaborates with community partners like museums, libraries, and schools to understand how these tools are used by learners in practice.

Liam Young is an artist, director, and BAFTA-nominated producer who creates imaginary worlds as a way of thinking through the futures we fear, desire, and are already making. Described by the BBC as “the man designing our futures,” Young crafts stories that remind us that the future is not a distant inevitability but an act of collective imagination.

Young presents the lecture “New Planetary Imageries” for AAD Arguments. He is introduced by Director of MSAAD Lydia Kallipoliti, with responses by Michiel Helbig and AAD students.

Fabrizio Prati (Global Cities Design Initiative) is the Global Designing Cities Initiative Director of Design and Research. At GDCI, he oversees street design work across the organization’s programs and has led projects in more than 50 cities worldwide. He is one of the core authors of the Global Street Design Guide and has contributed to numerous other publications, including Designing Streets for Kids, Designing for Safe Speeds, and How to Implement Street Transformations.

The lecture is moderated by Ankita Chachra (Purpose Built Communities).

• Faculty Lola Ben-Alon is awarded the Carbontech Development Initiative grant.

• Faculty Amelyn Ng, Faculty Gabriel Vergara, and Christine Giorgio ‘19 M.Arch (Friends Making Work) co-cost “D.I.Y. DEPAVE Lunch and Learn” event with Arif Khan at the Center for Architecture, New York.