Home-X:
Course Website: Home-X
Instructors: James Powderly

Disruptive Home Economics will take us all through the center and to the fringe of what it means to make-it and do-it-yourself. Through in-class workshops and small group or individual assignments, this course will expose students, instructors and guests to a range of tools and public domain research selected to expand our concept of what we can make ourselves at home. We will start by making or modifying existing DIY and How-to projects and studying the way other makers solve problems and create documentation. Over the course of the semester, we will get hands-on experience designing, documenting and sharing our own DIY projects and research. We will take a generalist’s approach and expose ourselves to projects that involve a wide range of mechanical, electrical, computational and chemical processes. We will combine novel tools and materials with common ones and build projects for ourselves as well as tools for others. Along the way, we will also look at the way local and global cultural contexts influence the tools and technologies we make and those we use, as well as the implications of open source production by the masses. Students will be encouraged to release their work as openly and widely as possible and to experiment with traditional and contagious distribution of their projects.