V. Mitch McEwen [Co-founder A(n) Office/Assistant Professor, Princeton University School of Architecture] reflects on her path into architecture, urban design and academia. McEwen discusses current projects including the Black Box research group at Princeton University’s Embodied Computation Lab, work with a range of cultural institutions and a project for “The Architectural Imagination” at the Venice Architecture Biennale 2016.

Our perception of the world is largely shaped through the mediums of fiction.

Design as a human right, not a luxury or a privilege, has been a part of SCI-Arc’s mission and pedagogy since the school’s founding in 1972. It is in this spirit that, in January 2019, SCI-Arc in partnership with the Goethe-Institut Los Angeles, turned the school’s attention to one of the most pressing issues of our moment and our city: homelessness. In a four-day, all-school workshop, SCI-Arc came together as a community of designers to make a contribution to the body of thinking on homelessness.

Generously funded by a grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, “Our Automated Future: Science through Storytelling” takes a journey into a series of speculative futures crafted by students in SCI-Arc’s EDGE Fiction and Entertainment postgraduate program directed by coordinator Liam Young with program faculty Alexey Marfin.