Teaching with Things

Teaching With Things advanced a technologically-enabled, media-rich, and intellectually lively approach to object-oriented instruction in the liberal arts. Leveraging Harvard’s unique archival, library, and museum collections, and established and emergent technology for digital imaging, 3D modeling, and multimedia annotation and presentation, and recognizing that collections- based teaching, research, and training remain, at best, of secondary importance within most fields of the humanities and social sciences, the project created a flexible, scalable, hybrid practice of digital curation to bear in the classroom. It associated extant resources of digital text, sound, and still and moving image with experimental 3D scanning and prototyping to create rich multimedia contexts, through which students in a series of specially-designed experimental courses engaged collections objects in their fullest material dimensions.

Selected list of collections-centered courses:

Critical History, HSCI, Spring 2011

Digital Humanities Workshop, RLL/LCL, Spring 2012

15 Things (A Secret History of Italian Industrial Design), GSD, Fall 2012 Mixed-Reality City, GSD, 2011-2013