Guest speaker: Dr. Elizabeth Fox, University of Cambridge
Readings
Fox, Elizabeth. Introduction, Chapter 3, “The Ger District,” and Chapter 5, “Performing (for) the Bureaucratic Gaze” in Between Iron and Coal: Enacting Kinship, Bureaucracy, and Infrastructure in the Ger Districts of Ulaanbaatar. Doctoral thesis (PhD), University College London, 2019.
Abu-Lughod, Lila. “Chapter 43: Writing Against Culture” in The Cultural Geography Reader. Routledge, 2008. ISBN: 9780203931950.
Homework
Due: Fail-to-Pass Assignment
This two-part assignment asks you to consider the stakes of engineering solutions that center functionality above all else. First, find and describe two instances of products or other engineering solutions that fulfilled their functional requirements perfectly but otherwise were a complete flop because they didn’t consider the people who interacted with or were affected by the product or solution. Then, we challenge you to sketch an engineering solution to a societal problem, a potential product, or any other system that also meets its functional requirements (you will have to articulate what these are) and would obviously be a complete disaster or otherwise not fulfill the mission of the product or solution. You can create this document freeform, through any combination of writings, images (with sources/citations), and hand/computer sketches to help illustrate your points. The better your artifact meets its functional requirements, and the more catastrophically it would fail, the better!
