This dissertation project (completed Winter 2017) aims to recontextualize the agency of design within the operational landscape of media through an investigation of its productive, infrastructural, and administrative spaces. By mapping the simultaneous global and local footprints of the media industry, this project contextualizes the relationship between the grounded materiality and geographic specificity of media on one hand, and its standardized practices and generalized flows on the other hand. Hence, the project is interested in the dynamic relationship between processes of planetary urbanization and the operational landscape of media—as the material basis of the moments of extended urbanization—articulated through interactions with local geographic, political, and social formations.

Outcome:  DDes Thesis, Harvard GSD, 2017