ARC4500H 
Instructors: Steven Fong, Lorne Gertner
Tuesdays, 3:00PM - 6:00PM

This graduate level seminar course is devoted to exploring actionable entrepreneurial possibilities at the intersection of design-based thinking and business practices. The intention is to help students reconsider design ideation in the context of real-world forces that shape private sector enterprises.

The course consists of seminars delivered by faculty and invited guest speakers. Speakers are drawn from across a spectrum of disciplines and stakeholders allied with architecture. Past speakers have included business owners, developers, agency executives, CFO’s, lawyers and activists. The curriculum includes an introduction to business model development; branding and marketing; value proposition creation; prototyping; and presentation.

In each iteration of this course, students have learned about entrepreneurship in relation to a specific opportunity. Past themes of the course have included the economies of small-batch manufacturing; digital disruption; and the effect of changes in governmental legislation. This year we will focus on the post-pandemic challenges of urban commercial real estate.

Students should augment their knowledge of the narrative and morphology of the city and its sites. In this course speakers will address the site as a value proposition with opportunities for new ways of thinking about use and engagement with an audience. An outcome of the course is the ability to imagine unknown hybrids of physicality and use. And to develop the visual material and presentation skills to effectively communicate this to a diverse range of stakeholders representing heterogenous disciplinary bac grounds.