Behnaz Farahi, Assistant Professor of Media Arts and Sciences; Morningside Academy for Design (MAD) Professor
MAS.S603 0 9
Monday 2-5pm
E14-493
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Course
Critical Matter: Emotive Design from Fashion to Urban Scale
What if design were not just about form or function, but a vehicle for interrogating critical issues of our time? How might we engage design as a medium for affective connection and critical reflection? Could design be critical? Not only “critical thinking” but also "critical feeling" by interrogating what you feel and why you feel the way you feel. How can we understand emotion not as sentimentality, but as a force that shapes relationality, structures power, and reveals hidden social dynamics?
This hybrid course combines theory and practice to explore the role of critical feeling in design spanning spatial and material scales, from fashion to architecture and urban environments. While critical thinking helps us unpack dominant narratives, critical feeling invites us to sense and articulate the undercurrents those narratives often obscure: the visceral, affective, and embodied responses that shape how we live and act.
Students will investigate how emotion could be embodied, expressed, and mediated through material interfaces, and technological systems. In addition, the course introduces students to material exploration inspired by nature, form-finding processes, and techniques inspired by new materialism, encouraging them to experiment with how the physical properties of materials can shape affective experience.
Drawing on neuroscience, philosophy, affect theory, critical theory, feminism, and new materialism, the course examines how design can amplify, enhance, or challenge emotional experience, social dynamics, and structures of power. Special attention is given to emotion as a cultural and psychosocial practice, engaging issues of surveillance, identity, gender and power as they manifest through the materiality of designed artifacts and systems.
Through readings, lectures, discussions, hands-on workshops, and iterative design interventions, students will explore how emotion is sensed, embodied, across cultural and social landscape. By the end of the course, students will produce a group design research project at a scale of their choice. The course aims to cultivate affective design practices capable of fostering critical feeling, and new forms of relationality. Possible outcomes might include interactive fashion or wearable systems, immersive installations, or urban interventions incorporating media architecture.
Draft Schedule. Subject to change based on class progress.
Week 1 – Sept 8: Introduction, What is design? Why design matters? Critical Design/Thinking/Feeling/Matter
Week 2 – Sept 15: Critical Design, Body, Technology (Perceiving, Extending, Relating Body)
Week 3 – Sept 22: Social Body, What is Emotion?; Social Computing, Affective Data Visualization, Sensing Emotions, Surveillance
Week 4 – Sept 29: Emotion in Animal and Machine
Week 5 – Oct 6: Sensing Emotions & Affective Computing
Week 6 – Oct 13: No Class (Indigenous Peoples’ Day)
Week 7 – Oct 20: Evoking Emotions & Anthropomorphism
Week 8 – Oct 27: Material Intelligence, New Materialism, Form Finding
Week 9 – Nov 3: Material Expressivity & Computational Materials
Week 10 – Nov 10: No Class (Student Holiday)
Week 11 – Nov 17: Body, Space & Prosthetics
Week 12 – Nov 24: Cultural Politics of Emotions
Week 13 – Dec 1: Critical Reflections on Technology
Week 14 – Dec 8: Desk Crit
Week 15 – Dec 15: Final Presentation
GRADING BREAKDOWN
Mini Project 1 15%
Mini Project 2 15%
Final Project 30%
Crit Sessions 10%
Presentations 20%
Presence 10%
Sign-up Sheet
This course is limited to 20 students. If you are seriously interested in joining, please fill out this sign-up sheet using this link.
Pre/Cross-Registration, MIT Canvas 2025, and Sign-Up Form
▶︎ PRE-REGISTRATION / CROSS-Registration: If you are interested in taking this course, please pre-register for MAS.S60 by September 8nd (Monday), 2025, so that your name will show up on the MIT CANVAS. Your accessibility to the MIT CANVAS as a pre-registered student is the condition for the MAS.S60 enrollment. If you need help pre-registering, please get in touch with the Registrar’s Office at MIT or the Registrar’s Office at your institution.
Skill Level
This is an interdisciplinary course open to students from across campus, welcoming a range of backgrounds and perspectives. Students from the Architecture, as well as Computer Science, Mechanical Engineering and Neuroscience, are especially encouraged to participate.
Students with experience in digital design, digital fabrication, electronics, or coding will find these skills particularly valuable in the course, though they are not required.
If you have questions, please email criticalMatter@media.mit.edu.