Dear University of Chicago Class of 2023,
I join over 30 University of Chicago faculty to invite you to join the inaugural UChicago Futures Design Challenge. Becoming part of the community at the University of Chicago brings with it an opportunity to do more than earn a degree from a prestigious institution. We believe that you have the intellect, creativity, and collaborative capacities to think beyond conventional boundaries of knowledge and to take on the greatest problems of our time.
This year, our group with members from the humanities, arts, social sciences, biological sciences, physical sciences has identified our shared big problem as climate change. We invite you to form teams of 3-5 students. On September 27, teams will compete for several prizes. The faculty that make up the Fourcasters will judge the design challenge, but they will also serve as coaches in the process. Our group includes faculty across disciplines. They include David Archer (a climate scientist who runs a massive open online course on global warming that reaches about 15,000 people globally each year), Shannon Dawdy (an anthropologist who uses archaeological methods, is working on a film, and is the recipient of the prestigious MacArthur Fellowship), Pedro Lopes (a computer scientist who works at the cutting edge of virtual reality and wearable computing), and Eve Ewing (a sociologist of education and writer of Marvel’s Ironheart comic book series).
All of the Fourcasters are people who take intellectual risks and seek to make a major difference in the world. We now invite you to start your time at the University of Chicago with a small intellectual risk that carries a huge upside. We want you to dream big. Reach out to fellow incoming classmates. Introduce yourself. Make a team. Brainstorm ideas. Meet your professors before you even take your first course in the fall. More than that, this Challenge is a way of tapping into the full potential of your education and challenging yourself to tackle on the world’s most serious issues.
When you sign up for the Futures Design Challenge, your team will turn to any discipline or interdisciplinary approach to prototype and design an intervention into the issue of climate change. To be clear: This is not just a call to scientists. For example, I work in the humanities and the arts. My research take place in fields like media studies, cultural theory, and game design. Even so, I think about the ways to use fiction, film, games, and digital media to pass through media noise to make a difference in urgent issues such as climate change. You are not limited by format. You can come up with a technological idea, propose an original policy change, write a song, propose a geoengineering solution, or anything else you can imagine.
The Fourcasters have created a short video with advice about how to form a team and approach a big problem in a collaborative and interdisciplinary manner. We hope the video helps and inspires you to fourward better futures. As we approach your arrival on campus, Fourcasters will be posting on this blog to share insights and possible areas to address. We look forward to meeting you in September.
Patrick Jagoda
Associate Professor of English and Cinema & Media Studies
University of Chicago
