ETH-Singapore Month 2019: The Future of Urban Society – STP3 Workshop: Science – Technology – (Prototyping, Policy, Practice)

Abstract

Inspired by ETH Zurich's "Critical Thinking Initiative" and particularly the success of "ETH Week," the ETH Singapore Month brings together a group of approx. 60 graduate students from different disciplines and universities to tackle contemporary societal and environmental challenges. The workshop, under the heading "The Future of Urban Society," focuses on global urbanization processes in view of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) – the latter understood as a modern-day contrat social in need of implementation strategies. Foregrounding the role of design (and design thinking) as a platform for multi-, inter-, and transdisciplinary work, students are confronted with so-called "wicked problems" – to borrow an expression introduced by design theorists Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber in the early 1970s. Teams of students are asked to deploy their imagination and respective disciplinary knowledge to develop approaches for transferring scientific and technical findings pertaining to societal challenges into applicable propositions. Moving from science to technology to practice, the educational framework aims to foster self-critical thinking and an ethical posture vis-à-vis society at large – via dialogue and playful interaction. The didactic approach is framed by 5 input themes that students will be asked to simultaneously address: a) one of the 17 SDGs foregrounding a particular global challenge; b) models of governance raising the question of policy and societal organization; c) a particular theoretical text allowing to situate the work within the history of ideas; d) a specific modeling or prototyping technique addressing the importance of 'making' within design 'thinking'; and e) a certain physical and cultural context within which to ground the work in situ – i.e., the specificity of place. The input themes aim to bridge the alleged gaps between theory and practice, the general and the specific, as well as the abstract and the concrete. The workshop is taking place outside the confines of a familiar setting – namely, within the research environment of Singapore in South East Asia. Participating universities: ETH Zurich, Cambridge University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), TU Munich, National University of Singapore (NUS), Nanyang Technological University (NTU), and Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD).