GSD Platform 7

This volume documents a selection of activities and events at the Harvard Graduate School of Design during the past academic year, bringing together the production of a multitude of designers, authors, and makers. Many of the featured projects reflect the School's desire to have global impact and transform the built environment for the better. This work has often been undertaken through a combination of individual effort and collaborative practice, with a mindfulness of its reception and consequences for others. The GSD feels compelled to highlight both the autonomy of the output as presented and the performative, circumstantial, and globally responsive conditions of its making. It is very important for the work of GSD students and faculty to be situated in the world and, in the process, rethinking and remaking that world.The Harvard Graduate School of Design prides itself on the wide scope of its global aspirations, collaborations, and projects. As a School, we are deeply interested in the conditions giving rise to new topics that benefit from the design imagination of our students and faculty across a range of fields and practices. This approach is not so much new as it is intentional, forming a deliberate cornerstone of our mission and pedagogy. We wish for our work to be transformative in multiple locations and in richly varied geographies, societies, economies, cultures, ans political circumstances. The projects presented in this book all play their part in taking up this planetary imperative. (From the Preface to Platform 6, by Mohsen Mostafavi)