Emily Yang: Challenging Students to Shape the Future
When Emily Yang, a part-time faculty member in the BBA Strategic Design and Management program, watches a movie like Minority Report, she’s not just enjoying a sci-fi action thriller. She’s thinking about what it can tell us about algorithmic bias.
The science fiction genre serves as a dynamic teaching tool in courses Yang teaches, such as Science Fiction: Designing the Future Through Speculative Design and Storytelling. Considering how “volatile and uncertain the world feels now,” she says, design students can learn a lot from sci fi.
“Look at Snowpiercer,” Yang says. “Humanity is saved by technology, but the human problems continue.” She points to author Ursula K. Le Guin, who “was already talking about gender fluidity” in her futuristic literature 30 years ago, and Margaret Atwood, who “coined the word ‘ustopia’ to remind us to look for the dystopia latent in utopian societies.”
When students in Yang’s classes envision and create their own sci-fi world of the future, they are challenged to consider equity, sustainability, and a range of human factors. They think about how cities function, what homes look like, what food is eaten, how transportation works. “We often feel like it’s hard to change the future,” Yang says, “but it is possible.”
Yang points out that Parsons has a world-class program in speculative design led by renowned faculty members Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby. Yang joined the department with a master’s in design engineering from Harvard and a degree in economics and art history from NYU. She has worked as a UX designer and currently consults on the field of futures design. Yang is also a fine artist who creates ceramics and block prints exploring gender and other social issues and her Chinese American heritage.
Yang appreciates her students’ openness to new ideas and their critical thinking. As she puts it, “My students make me feel like the field of design is just beginning.”