Technological life in the future will be a series of endless upgrades and the rate of graduations is accelerating. As the population in our cities is increasing rapidly, so is the number of diverse possibilities through which cities and citizens are interacting mutually. After two episodes of Tehran Inside-out, focusing on innovative ways to make our cities more responsive towards our lives, it’s time to put more emphasis on what our surrounding environment wants us to know. We want to listen to our surrounding, collect data with a specific story behind, invent creative strategies for storytelling and motivate citizens to dig deeper.

Our physical environment is continuously being monitored. There are various sets of data available; each describing an environmental phenomenon. But, we never bend our data gathering process to what a common tool can offer out of the box. We’re not looking for ready-made solutions. Instead, we take advantage of recent technologies to design creative tools and processes to acquire desired datasets.
Although data gathering is a fundamental step in our process, numerical data don’t mean anything by themselves. Even though each data set is a placeholder for something else, it needs some kind of translator to acknowledge and leverage this knowledge by bringing society closer to the represented information.

In this constant state of becoming, our main focus will be on creative solutions for data to become information. Inventing tools and experiences to shed a light on the stories behind these datasets is what we are investigating in Global Summer School 2019. Relying on emerging technologies to add a narrative to the data and create unexpected aesthetics is our main strategy to share what these numbers actually represent. Scripting Awareness is what we call this process of sharing information.

IAAC Global Summer School is a full-time two week course, 1-14 July 2019, that provides both practical and theoretical knowledge. The program is led by expert tutors, combined with lectures by renowned professionals and academics relevant to the topics to be treated during the course. These will be broadcasted in the different node-cities, all globally connected. Tehran node’s program also includes a series of local lectures. Participants will join a global agenda and an international laboratory at their disposal to test their design hypothesis, understanding how design conclusions derived locally can be tested and evolved globally in the different cities where other teams reside.
The course will be taught by tutors from different fields structured in two subsequent phases. Over the first days of the workshop, computational design systems will be introduced in a series of intensive ‘tooling-up’ sessions as the basis for investigating associative design concepts and methodologies. The aim of these design exercises is to introduce expertise in open-source technologies. In a second stage of the workshop, students will develop design proposals responding to studio brief.