12 Sep, 2018

Architectural Intelligence

with Molly Wright Steenson
Associate Professor of Ethics and Computational Technologies at Carnegie Mellon University
In partnership with the Department of Architecture

Molly Wright Steenson is a designer, author, professor, and international speaker whose work focuses on the intersection of design, architecture, and artificial intelligence. She is Senior Associate Dean for Research for the College of Fine Arts, the K&L Gates Associate Professor of Ethics and Computational Technologies, and an associate professor in the School of Design at Carnegie Mellon University. Steenson is the author of Architectural Intelligence: How Designers and Architects Created the Digital Landscape (MIT Press, 2017), which tells the radical history of AI’s impact on design and architecture, and the forthcoming book Bauhaus Futures (MIT Press, expected 2019), co-edited with Laura Forlano & Mike Ananny. A web pioneer since 1994, she’s worked at groundbreaking design studios, consultancies, and Fortune 500 companies.

From 2013–15, Molly was an assistant professor in the School of Journalism & Mass Communication at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she taught data visualization, digital studies, and communications courses, and led Mellon-funded research projects in the digital humanities. She was a professor at the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea in Ivrea, Italy in 2003–04, where she led the Connected Communities research group, and an adjunct professor at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena in the Media Design Practices Program from 2010–12.

She has worked with companies including Reuters, Scient, Netscape, and Razorfish. She cofounded Maxi, an award-winning women’s webzine, in the 90s. As a design researcher, she examines the effect of personal technology on its users, including projects in India and China for Microsoft Research and ReD Associates/Intel Research.

About the History and Theory of New Media Lecture Series

The History and Theory of New Media Lecture Series brings to campus leading humanities scholars working on issues of media transition and technological emergence. The series promotes new, interdisciplinary approaches to questions about the uses, meanings, causes, and effects of rapid or dramatic shifts in techno-infrastructure, information management, and forms of mediated expression. Presented by the Berkeley Center for New Media, these events are free and open to the public.

2018

September 12 | 6:30 — 8:00 PM | 112 Wurster Hall
Beyond the Trolley: Implications of AI and Design
Molly Wright Steenson, Carnegie Mellon University
In partnership with the Department of Architecture

October 4 | 5:00 — 6:30 PM | BCNM Commons, 310 Moffitt Library
Learning To Interact: Cybernetics and Play
Timothy Stott, Dublin School of Creative Arts, Dublin Institute of Technology

2019

Mar 20 | 5:00 — 6:30 PM | 310 Banatao Auditorium, Sutardja Dai Hall
Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism
Safiya Noble, University of Southern California
Co-sponsored by the CITRIS Policy Lab

Apr 03 | 5:00 — 6:30 PM | BCNM Commons, 340 Moffitt Undergraduate Library
The Human Computer in the Stone Age: Technology, Prehistory, and the Redefinition of the Human after World War II
Stefanos Geroulanos, New York University