Grace Ong Yan

Ong Yan taught “Inhabiting Media,” at Thomas Jefferson University in 2021. The seminar and workshop examined the dynamic and complex relationship between media and the spatial disciplines of interior design and architecture. The students examined spatial design as media and embodiments of particular ideas and values—and at the impact that communication media have had on the practice of design and the way we experience built environments. The research component of Inhabiting Media equipped students with theoretical frameworks and case studies in order to cultivate a critical understanding of media and space, its strategies and implications. The design workshop activated theoretical understandings with an interdisciplinary and collaborative design project.

Students created photomontages based on historical and theoretical texts of the 1960s and1970s. The readings included writings by Walter Benjamin, Marshall McLuhan, Rem Koolhaas, Guy deBord, among others.

For the seminar, students designed a media project which entailed in-depth research of a time-based logistical system, with possibilities including airports, shipping containers, retail, hotels, parks, warehouses, and offices. Based on their research, they created a mapping to represent the logistics of the system, a spatial inventory. Students were then asked to propose a “counterscenario,” in which a social cause would infiltrate the system. The counterscenario was developed into a prototype design which was inserted into multiple hypothetical scenarios and sites.