This directed study allows students to pursue independent research and develop their representational techniques over the duration of the summer term.

Within a consistent theme of landscapes of resource extraction, each student will research a material commodity by proceeding from the general, focusing studies on the British Columbia or Cascadia region, to the specific. With a process that mimics GPI (graduate thesis work), students are expected to conduct persistent yet broad research in order to investigate a topic of interest and will aim to identify sites of intervention by the close of the term. This course then frames design not as a formal organization of space but as an act of representing legible and communicable information of economically important, politically charged and ethically contentious sites. For these drawings to engender discussion with multiple stakeholders, students must aim to present data in a fair and objective manner. A set of deliverables will cover multiple modes of representation and explore a single extractive landscape through multiple scales and perspectives.