Shannon Mattern, Visiting Lecture, The Sustainability Stack: Cross-Scalar Design at the Library Field
- Event Type
- Lecture
- Sponsor
- B.S. Sustainable Design + Art & Design
- Location
- Plym Auditorium, 134 Temple Hoyne Buell Hall
- Date
- Mar 2, 2026 5:30 pm
- Speaker
- Shannon Mattern
- sustaindesign@illinois.edu
- Views
- 9
Bio: Shannon Mattern is the Director of Creative Research at the Metropolitan New York Library Council. Previously, she held full professorships in media studies, anthropology, and art history at The New School and the University of Pennsylvania. Her research and teaching focus on media architectures, information infrastructures, and urban technologies. She is the author of The New Downtown Library: Designing with Communities; Deep Mapping the Media City; Code and Clay, Data and Dirt: 5000 Years of Urban Media; and A City Is Not a Computer. She also contributes a regular long-form column about urban data and mediated infrastructures to Places Journal and regularly collaborates on public design and interactive projects and exhibitions. In 2025, she was the Kluge Chair in Modern Culture at the Library of Congress and the Design Indexer in residence at the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum. You can find her at wordsinspace.net.
Synopsis: What if we created a library outside? What if the clouds and leaves, snowflakes and weeds, roots and rocks were our collection? In this talk I explore the cross-disciplinary design practice through which the Metropolitan New York Library Council’s new Library Field project is coming into fruition. We’ll examine how myriad design fields — from traffic and water engineering, to landscape and interface design, to wayfinding and media curation — converge in this project, sited on a plot of land just north of New York City.