The elective course “Rethinking Development and Sustainable Futures” is a reading course that takes a critical stance by scrutinizing how the fundamental concepts of “Development” and “Sustainability” are understood. With growing concerns of climate change, loss of ecosystems, forced migration, urbanisation, and increasing social and economic disparities, these are concepts of global importance to the fields of design, architecture, urbanism, and landscape architecture; concepts that are partially interrelated, sometimes conflicting, and often prey to sectoral or profession-based interpretations. In this course, we will be stepping outside our “defined” professions to critically rethink the future of both development and sustainability through interdisciplinary readings, discussions, and writing. The goal is to reveal and deliberate the kind of paradigms such assumed conceptions and discourses typically hold and what they try to sustain. The course will also explore if there are other alternatives to be found that also could be engaged with, promoted, and acted upon. Informed by these dialogues, Students will produce articles or essays based on their reading on a topic of interest. They will also be tasked with critiquing each other's texts as a part of the production.

The studio is run by the Institute of Architecture and Institute of Design together with Comte Bureau and in collaboration with OBOS as a cross-disciplinary research exercise to rethink housing in Oslo.

In the 1930s Oslo experienced challenges of inadequate and unhealthy living conditions and lack of affordable housing for families. Oslo Municipality gathered a research group consisting of architects, engineers and sociologists to work together to study and improve this housing situation. Post-war housing standards, housing cooperations, homeownership policies and planned communities were further developments of these efforts – a large part of the Oslo population lives in the resulting homes and neighbourhoods today.

In 2022 the challenges are new. An unregulated housing market means that homeownership in Oslo is becoming increasingly inaccessible. Family structures have changed: single households are becoming the norm and many feel lonely. Emerging technologies and new types of services transform our communities, social lives and neighbourhoods. Not to forget the challenges of adjusting the way we live to the new realities of climate change and environmental issues. These new challenges are reasons to rethink housing. 

However, these challenges are far too complex, wide-ranging and interconnected to be addressed by one design field alone. Instead, they require cross-disciplinary problem solvers to work together to craft a new way of thinking and working. Therefore, the course will be run by the Institute of Architecture and Institute of Design together with Comte Bureau, a leading actor in developing projects merging service design and architectural competencies. We will enable architecture and design students to work together as a team and to explore a cross-disciplinary, human-based working process and methodology. The studio research involves defining the needs of target groups, translating those needs into solutions, and finally developing a methodology for testing them.

This exploration will be made in collaboration with OBOS, a housing developer that was fundamental in the post-war efforts towards good, affordable housing. The studio will rethink the broader themes defined by OBOS Living lab; an experimental living arena that aims to enable quality in affordable living today. The studio sets out to investigate how we, by combining tools and methods available from social sciences, service design and architecture may address the many factors that influence the way we live. We will investigate living today and design the living of tomorrow. We will research how decisions makers, developers, architects and designers can develop housing and neighbourhoods more fitted to present-day challenges.

The course looks at an expanding overlap between interaction design, architecture and media arts, to explore how the ideas and methods of interaction design can be applied in larger environments and spaces. The course investigates emerging trends in responsive spaces and installations, environments and interactive architecture, focusing on larger scale experiences, using physical spaces as the arena for interaction. These investigations will look beyond the direct point and click‐style interactions to less direct forms.

Interactive Spaces and Environments is aimed at both design and architecture students, working in cross‐disciplinary collaboration, and aims to foster thinking and designing beyond the material object, towards the experimental and performative.

The second part of the interaction design programme focuses on the complex connected world we now live in, where visual interfaces are increasingly prevalent (from mobile phones to large public information systems and presenting designers with fascinating, complex and highly relevant challenges. The course explores how these interfaces can be effectively integrated into networks and spaces; the information they contain and the messages they impart; and how we, as users, engage and interact with them.

New digital technologies, and the internet in particular, have changed the ways of production and consumption of information. The internet itself has undergone a sea-change in recent years, from primarily static and closed systems to infrastructures where openness, information sharing, collaboration and creativity are key ingredients. 

Massive information datasets and structures need to be presented in dynamic, user-friendly and accessible ways, allowing for easy navigation, providing an overview as well as detailed analysis. These sophisticated design challenges will be explored in a range of workshops and projects.The course will provide students with appropriate practical skills, design methods and design thinking tools, enabling them to tackle advanced screen-based design issues, and leading to the creation of engaging, informative and effective interfaces. The semester is a compilation of several smaller modules and workshops to introduce the students to the new and more screen specific methods, processes and tools that will form the core of the term. This will be followed by one final project, where students will develop more in-depth conceptual frameworks.