BEN KAZER


selected works



PROJECT SYNTHIA:  An Experiment in Emergent Design
2024-2025

with Harvard REAL Lab
Additional contributions pictured from: Melanie Louterbach, Cynthia Deng, Elif Erez
Project Synthia, by the Responsive Environments and Artifacts Lab (REAL) at the Harvard GSD, is a case study in emergent design methodology—an approach that treats collaboration as a dynamic system, where outcomes are not imposed but negotiated. Here, design is framed as an act of assembly, shaped by a multiplicity of voices—human, artificial, historical, and speculative—rather than a singular vision.

Creative Direction, Design Research, Exhibition Design, Fabrication





The project brought together designers, scientists, historians, artists, geologists, physicians, architects, engineers, and generative AI systems to create a speculative world and a collection of sensory machines that perform a fictive future archaeology of the present day. These machines—each representing an augmented human sense such as sight, smell, or sound—served as catalysts for collaborative inquiry into perception, history, storytelling, and the shifting role of technology in mediating urban experience.




A resulting exhibition became both the culmination and the documentation of this distributed creative process. The exhibition draws inspiration from radical experiments in design methodology, from Bruno Munari’s Da cosa nasce cosa (from one thing comes another) to the interdisciplinary ethos of Gyorgy Kepes, Chicago’s New Bauhaus, and MIT’s Center for Advanced Visual Studies (CAVS). Like these predecessors, it challenges the notion of authorship and control, embracing uncertainty as a generative force.



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all rights reserved © Ben Kazer 2026
ABOUT

Ben Kazer is a designer, researcher, and artist living and working in Cambridge, MA.  He completed his B.S in Cognitive Neuroscience at Tufts University and a Master in Design Studies at Harvard Graduate School of Design, where he continues to serve as a critic.