We live in an increasingly complex world. Our roads are falling apart, our city infrastructure is focused on penalizing people, and the tools that matter most for proper governance no longer fit the needs of the city nor are they useful for residents.

These contemporary problems and their solutions can be defined as complex adaptive systems. They emerge from the behavior of seven billion people looking for better standards of living when confronting daily challenges and opportunities. The complexity is augmented by the unprecedented interconnectivity of the world economy, the global society, and the natural environment.

In this course, the Sustainable Solutions Workshop with Carlos Texiera, Chris Rudd, and Ruth Schmidt as instructors, the class applied design methods and strategic thinking through open innovation practices for leveraging the interconnectivity of markets, technology, finance, and social networks. In doing so, the projects envision how sustainable solutions impact the local lives and wellbeing of communities, specifically Chicago. By using generative prototyping, the solutions modeled new infrastructures that enable new modes of operation, governance, and revenue generation, ultimately creating a more equitable and sustainable Chicago.

Designers : Ujjwal Anand, Abigail Auwaerter, Alison Chiu, Symone Fogg, Kota Fujikawa, Jerick Evans, Brayan Pabon Gomez, Katherine Gowland, Ruohua Huang, Takuya Isogai, Rosanna Lederhausen Sanhyong Park, Arijit Patra, Meghna Prakash, Katherine Reiser, Jeffrey Sprague, Takeshi Tanaka, Siyuan Teng, Kazumasa Yamada, Wenxuan Zhou

Course : Sustainable Solutions Workshop

Instructors : Carlos Texiera, Chris Rudd, and Ruth Schmidt