BAMPFA AR—Augmented Time explores new modes of narrative and storytelling using augmented reality as a medium. The project unfolds the history of the new BAMPFA, from the building’s inauguration in 1940 as the university printing press, to an abandoned structure covered with graffiti by local artists, to its transformation into a contemporary cultural hub. A narrator guides the user through an augmented timeline, following the history of the construction of the museum.

Yanni Loukissas, author Yanni Loukissas delivers a talk drawing on his new monograph from MIT Press, All Data Are Local: Thinking Critically in a Data-Driven Society, which is addressed to a growing audience of practitioners who want to work with unfamiliar data both effectively and ethically. Loukissas is an assistant professor of digital media in the School of Literature, Media, and...

The practice of composition is common to most creative and scholarly undertakings. Composition is where artistic or intellectual inspiration runs up against the everyday struggle of making. It comes from the Latin for "putting things together” — com-ponere. It involves questions of unity and linkage, of transition, of beginning, of ending. Many artists struggle (some famously) with the practice. Others delight in it. Some make it a theme of their own work.

Presented by the Berkeley Center for New Media Guy Hoffman, Robotics Researcher, Cornell University As we continue to develop social robots designed for connectedness, we struggle with paradoxes related to authenticity, transience, and replication. In this talk, Cornell University robotics researcher Guy Hoffman links his fifteen years of experience designing social robots with...

Allison Arieff, editorial director of SPUR This week, A + D Thursdays welcomes Allison Arieff, editorial director of SPUR, the San Francisco Bay Area Planning and Urban Research Association. A contributing columnist to the New York Times since 2006, Arieff writes about architecture, design, and cities for numerous publications including California Sunday, the MIT Technology Review, Dialogue,...

Julien Beller, architect Architect Julien Beller illuminates his atypical approach to urban design: calling into question how a city is built, he works towards building a just city, constructed with pleasure, where everyone has a place. His projects focus on autonomous zones (cultural spaces, work spaces, classrooms) and on housing and habitat for the city’s most precarious inhabitants...

Amy Franceschini, founder of Futurefarmers This week’s A+D Thursdays speaker is Amy Franceschini, the founder of Futurefarmers, a group of artists, designers, farmers, and architects with a common interest in creating frameworks of participation that recalibrate our cultural compass. Their work uses various media to enact situations that disassemble habitual apparatus: public policy, urban...