Public Programs And Events

New School faculty from across the university apply policy, design, and social justice perspectives to address critical environmental issues generated by the impacts of climate change and other environmental threats to community well-being.  Join TEDC's 2015 Faculty Grant recipients as they share their research.

 

Panelists:

Timon McPhearson: Connect the Dots: developing ecologically based design solutions for linking NYC parks, street trees, green streets, green roofs, green walls, and micro-urban spaces (dots) together in an ecological network to improve the lives of plant and animal species and the many benefits they provide for New Yorkers.

Ana Baptista: Climate Justice in Action: Grassroots Strategies for a Just Transition: all across the country, grassroots organizations are actively engaged in material and discursive struggles to resist neoliberal modes of development that exploit natural and human capital. 

Willi Semmler: Burden Sharing of Climate Policies: Adaptation polices concern providing buffers, provisions and infrastructure against climate risk arising from global warming (sea level rise, flooding, severe droughts, food losses, desert formation, storms, and hurricanes, damages to eco-systems). Yet, most research is not spelling out how such climate policies should be funded. Often those proposals pit current against future generations. We want to show that there is a better way to deal with this problem.

Ivan Ramirez: Temporal Discontinuities of Cholera Emergence in Northern Peru: Should We Blame Climatic Change?: This research critically examines the temporal links between climate change and cholera emergence in northern Peru. Overall, study findings provide evidence that a climate link, mediated by local hydrology, existed in the latter part of the 1990s, but found no evidence of climate impacts on cholera emergence in the earlier part of the decade. Explanations for this temporal discontinuity in climate-cholera relationships will be discussed.

Nick Brinen: Design-Build Public Space: The DOT Street Seats program is a seasonal public space that reclaims portions of New York City’s streets for much needed public space. These public spaces generally include decking, guardrails, and seating/tables for a neighborhood.  This first prototype from Parsons allowed students to collaborate with the DOT on developing a new Street Seats design. The 40ft x 6ft structure built by Parsons students at the Northeast corner of 13th Street and 5th Ave, incorporated necessary seating components and went further to incorporate materiality, vegetation, and graphic identity.  The structure was fabricated in the Parsons fabrication shops and assembled in a single day on site.

Timo Rissanen: Designing Endurance: Investigating User-Centered Fashion Design: Designing Endurance investigates the use of clothes in a design context, and in particular practices that can prolong the useful life of a garment, such as repair and customization. The aim is to uncover motivations behind wearing an item among a choice of many, as well as decisions leading up to laundering and eventual disposal of the garment. In the project, Rissanen is collaborating with a team of performance artist-researchers with the aim of capturing and communicating knowledge that traditional design research methods may not capture.

 

This event is sponsored by the Tishman Environment and Design Center, as part of Earth Week at The New School.