Do you sometimes feel overwhelmed when you sit down to write? Are you ever immobilized by the thought of all the work that’s before you? This writing retreat will transform your writing sessions by teaching you how to quickly clarify what needs to be done, what to do first, and how much to do. In the Ready, Set, Flow Writing Retreat, you will:Understand why it’s so hard to figure out where to startLearn a proven strategy for jumpstarting every writing sessionQuiet your doubts so you can write with focusExperience the boost in motivation that comes from writing with othersBy the end of the retreat, you’ll have made significant progress on your manuscript. And you’ll have a powerful tool you can use to boost your productivity--every time you sit down to write.About Your FacilitatorReady, Set, Flow is facilitated by Michelle Boyd, PhD., Founder and Director of InkWell Academic Writing Retreats. Michelle is an award-winning writer, scholar, and former tenured associate professor from the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC). She has been leading retreats since 2012, when she co-founded and coached her first retreat at UIC. Three years later, she left faculty life to create InkWell, where she helps scholars who dread writing develop a sustainable, satisfying, productive writing practice.This event is open to SHASS faculty, senior lecturers, graduate students, post-docs, and pre-docs.

Telltales of Tide and Terra is a participatory art project addressing the climate crisis through collaborative art making, public data visualization, and installations, which include shading structures and giant community meals. Upcycled textiles and its patterns transform complex climate data into accessible, emotionally engaging visual experiences that inspire climate action. The project is produced though collaborative screen printing and cyanotype workshops, for an exhibition at the MIT Art Festival (March 1-16, 2025) and the Venice Biennale of Architecture (May '25).You will learn cyanotype and screen printing. Everyone will be listed and credited in these exhibitions.Sign up by 1/20/2025 by emailing Merve Akdogan.

Organzied by the 11-6 (Urban Science and Planning with Computer Science) program, this workshop builds on the urban-related 6.100B problem sets (network routing, recursion and Monte Carlo simulation) but focuses on real-world contexts and decision-making cases. You will look into why these problems matter and who make the decisions - from the access and control of local roads, to mandatory insurance policy for coastal development, to locating essential public services, and hone your innovative problem-solving ability by designing and testing alternative problem formulations and exercising Python programming skills.11.085 | 1-0-1 Units for registered students. Audits welcomed.Schedule (All sessions from 10AM-12PM and will be held in 9-255):Monday, January 27 (Socio-technical Perspectives on Path Optimization Problems)Wednesday, January 29 (Stakeholders’ Interests and Risks in Public Policy Making)Friday, January 31 (Polling Places Locations, Closures and Where to Provide Essential Public Services)

The Art and Science of PCB Design is an introductory course into the fundamental aspects of developing electronic systems on printed circuit boards (PCBs). This course will heavily focus on providing hands-on labs with electronic design tools actively used in industry towards designing a primary course project resulting with the physical assembly of a PCB-based device. Students will gain experience in designing systems, conducting SPICE simulations, drawing schematics, and creating a PCB layout. Complex topics in electrical and PCB design will be explored, including from guest speakers and through advanced simulations. This class is intended for students of all skill-levels but at a minimum requires a basic understanding of circuit analysis, which will be applied towards learning how to implement real devices.Prerequisites: Understanding of basic circuit analysis provided in 6.200, 2.678, or equivalent. Prospective students who have not taken 6.200, 2.678, or an equivalent class will be required to pass a staff-created open-book pretest, prior to the start of IAP, that covers required circuit knowledge for the course. Prospective students should fill out the interest form located at: pcb.mit.edu.Lectures: MWF10, room 2-190Labs: 2-hour lab section on Tuesdays and Thursdays, room 38-530 (times TBD)Office hours: MWF 8a-10a, 11a-1p; TTh 5-7p, room 36-144Once accepted, please register for credit under EC.S03 or 6.S092, 6 units, p/d/f

The Seoul Metropolitan Government is seeking solutions to reconnect the city with the riverfront, proposing floating parks, highway coverings, and layered urban interventions. This workshop invites participants to envision innovative designs—such as bridges, floating structures, or highway coverings—that reunite the city with its landscape. The project integrates architecture, infrastructure, landscape, and climate considerations, addressing urban interventions to enhance seamless access to the riverfront. Projects can be developed individually or in groups using images, panels, models, or videos. Students in civil engineering, architecture (undergraduate or graduate), or related fields are welcome to explore ideas from conceptual design to master planning. Guidance will include virtual and in-person sessions with guest lecturers and critics. The aim of this course is to exhibit material together in Seoul in 2025.Students should bring laptop to all sessions with Rhinoceros installed.

Sign up by December 20, 2024 by emailing Lina Bondarenko.SSS is a workshop for the development of improvisational movements that survey sloped landscapes, negotiate with public infrastructures, and activate architectural sites. Inspired by dancer Anna Halprin’s Experiments in the Environment, we will practice foundational intuitive physical exercises and hand-drawing scores that recalibrate our notions of time and space. We will explore the historical relationship between urban design, choreography, and gravity, interrogating the persistence of horizontal surfaces and two dimensional representations in a tilted multi-dimensional world. By traveling locally on field trips to public parks and cultural sites, we will test a spatial practice for place-based learning inspired by landscape architect Lawrence Halprin’s RSVP cycles.SSS is a workshop for slorgs– sloped organisms. For millennia, human organisms have been collaborating with, traversing, inhabiting, perceiving, and relating to sloped terrain. Within the steep escarpments of the Great Rift Valley, a unique bioregional climate, landscape, and ecology fostered the evolution of our ancestors into upright hominids. The original stewards of this land, the Massachuseuk people, derived their name after the sacred hill Massa-adchu-es-et, massa meaning "large," adchu meaning "hill," et an identifier of place, translating roughly as "large hill place" (Jarzombek). The city of Boston was even founded as a colony in search of the “city upon a hill.” The condition of the slope is fundamentally coded within our very existence, the slorg’s physiology and cognition driven by the undulations of the land.Through learning to slow our attention to the subjective intelligence sensed by the body in space, slorgs are able to tune our pulse to the rhythms of the earth’s cycles, revealing environmental entanglements and response-abilities. We engage in sympoeisis—making with our communities of humans and non-humans (Haraway)—by moving with. SSS will culminate in the creation of a site-specific, collective happening in the legacy of the 1960’s Fluxus artists.SSS welcomes participants of all backgrounds and abilities with no prior familiarity with dance to experiment freely, embedding their own daily patterns within local ecology. As we transition between seasons and semesters, SSS is a method for grounding and acknowledging our position with this moment.COMMENTS/QUESTIONS1:00-3:00 Field Trips and score drawing (weather permitting) 3:00-4:00 Break/Rest/Commute 4:00-6:00 Movement in dance studio, guest speakersParticipants can Bring: a sketchbook and pens Wear: loose, comfortable, breathable clothing for studio sessions and warm weather-resistant layers for field trips.Lina Bondarenko is a current graduate student in SMArchS Urbanism at MIT Architecture, following a career practicing architecture and urbanism, teaching design at an arts high school, and a lifetime dancing and performing with various dance troupes. SSS follows her research on urban infrastructure of sloped terrain as spaces of subjugation and solidarity, presented as public happenings at architecture conferences in San Francisco titled “Steep Urbanist.”