Architecture Commons^™

Panopticon: A Privacy Revelation, Kexin Wang, Zhexu Yang

Architecture Thesis Prep

Our thesis project studies and analyzes the control of Surveillance Capitalism over people’s privacy, and how to make people realize the importance of privacy through the means of an architectural/design narrative. This concept comes from Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power, which explains how tech companies collect extra data, capture people’s behavioral surplus and sell them to third party customers, such as advertising companies, thus the predictions about people’s preferences accordingly. In this process, technology companies can make tremendous profit by stealing users’ personal information and then …

Parity, Hamza Hasan

Architecture Senior Theses

Digital data contributes to an increasingly alienated aspect of our infrastructure. The complex practices of the Internet produce highly specified, engineered objects. Though their forms are ‘optimized,’ their intentions are not: the two primary considerations for the development of the infrastructure of the Internet are energy and security. Each category presents its own deliberations, but both often produce non-architectural, infrastructural elements beyond public visibility. The hidden infrastructure of data storage and mining (the indexing and analysis of data and traffic) produces spaces outside the agency of normative architectural discourse.

The key consideration for the design of the Internet is redundancy, …