Faculty Position in Data and Design

Faculty Position in Data and Design
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
School of Architecture and Planning, Department of Architecture
Cambridge, MA
Full time

Description:

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology Department of Architecture, together with the Schwarzman College of Computing (SCC), seeks candidates for a tenure-track faculty position in Data and Design to be hired at the Assistant Professor level to begin January 1, 2023, or on a mutually agreed date thereafter.

The need for a sustainable built environment demands new tools and new approaches to design and visualization. We are seeking a new faculty member dedicated to design research efforts that leverage information, creative computation, and digital tools to create new approaches and impacts—from the scale of neighborhoods and communities to the scale of the planet.

The position is open to multiple interpretations of this challenge. These include design as an interface to information, new conceptions of the role of information in design processes and outcomes, the creation of intelligent design tools, speculative and creative computation, data-rich installations, visualization-as-animation, and critical approaches to spatialized visualization in the context of machine learning and artificial intelligence. We are interested in new modes of practice and new approaches to the social, cultural, and ethical aspects of design in a landscape of data and its application to design problems.

At the Institute level, this position will contribute to larger conversations at MIT about the role of data and computing in creative thinking, culture, expression, and problem-solving. Alongside colleagues at the intersection of computing and fields such as music and linguistics, the successful candidate will help reveal how data and computing can inform design, and also, crucially, how design thinking and culture can inform new approaches to computing.

While candidates will be expected to situate themselves in a department concerned with the future of the planet and built environment, they may also situate themselves in one or more specific scales at which the department undertakes these efforts–from the design of objects, to landscapes, to physical architecture, which remains at the center of the department’s work.

At the department level, the successful candidate will contribute to teaching in design programs at every level, with an emphasis on research-focused graduate work and undergraduate teaching in architecture and design. The successful candidate will show potential to develop courses that reach across disciplinary boundaries, as part of a larger, Institute-wide conversation on design, to which the Department of Architecture is a central contributor.

Uniquely situated at the intellectual intersection(s) of the Department of Architecture and the SCC, this faculty position will provide strategic linkages between the cultures of architectural design and computation. While the candidate’s teaching and tenure process will be located primarily in Architecture, they will contribute actively to the growth and development of the SCC, with balanced responsibilities in teaching and service in the SCC.

Above all, the successful candidate will be proactive in identifying opportunities for new forms of connectivity between the Department of Architecture and the SCC.

One of MIT’s first departments and home to the first professional program in Architecture in the US, the MIT Department of Architecture is dedicated to an equitable, sustainable, humanistic, and technologically sophisticated vision of design and pedagogy. The academic structure of the department is unique in that each of its five disciplinary areas–1) Architecture + Urbanism,
2) History, Theory and Criticism,
3) Building Technology,
4) Art, Culture and Technology, and
5) Computation–work at equal intensity across disciplinary boundaries to create an environment in which innovative research and scholarship fuse with the pedagogical agendas of ongoing design inquiries. The department also engages productively in research and education alliances with the other units in the School of Architecture…