AI Design for Ocean Solutions
Returning for its 2nd year, this J-term course at Harvard’s metaLAB will teach students how to use generative AI for creative interventions in ocean conservation
Course Overview
Climate change and human industrialization are having an accelerating negative impact on the ocean, the source of life and water on earth, which covers 71% of the planet. This hands-on course will bring generative AI tools and design interventions to one of our biggest climate challenges today: the ocean.
Through a series of short lectures and design-thinking activities, we will use generative AI tools to engage creatively with select topics in marine and climate science. The course will permit students to learn how to use AI tools for brainstorming, infusing some randomness and chance into scientific ideation. Students will learn about some of our most intractable and important ocean challenges, and use these novel AI methods for outside the box prototyping of possible solutions.
In-class time will be split between learning marine topics such as rising ocean temperatures, coral reef degradation, sea level rise, pollution, and unsustainable exploitation of resources (including overfishing, oil drilling, deep sea mining, mangrove removal for coastal development) and exploring possible interventions to address these issues by brainstorming and prototyping with generative AI tools to push the boundaries of traditional thinking. The course will also cover the environmental impacts of AI, recent developments in AI technology to address climate and ocean issues, and introduce the concept of “nature tech.” Outside of class time will be devoted to students’ researching their chosen topics to learn whether their intervention ideas have been tried, and if not, why not.
By the end of the four day course, students will each have created an ocean solution as a conceptual or built prototype to present to the class. This course will be taught by metaLAB Director of Art & Education Sarah Newman, scientist and ocean enthusiast Heather Newman, GSD lecturer and designer Eric Rodenbeck, and metaLAB researcher and engineer Sebastian Rodriguez.
Student Showcase
Below are some examples of previous work students submitted when this course was offered during the 2025 J-term at the Harvard Graduate School of Design.
Sign up for the course
This 4-day J-term course will run from Monday, January 12 through Thursday, January 15, 2026 from 1-3 pm each day.
Stay updated
If you’re interested in hearing about future workshops and events, sign up below!
Course Instructors
Sarah Newman
Sarah Newman is metaLAB (at) Harvard’s Director of Art & Education, within the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society. Working at the intersection of research, design, and education, her work engages with technology’s role in human experience, with a particular focus on AI ethics and pedagogy. She regularly teaches and lectures on a range of topics related to AI, creativity, ethics, and education. Her research in artificial intelligence investigates how emerging technologies embed and mirror historical and societal issues. Newman leads metaLAB’s AI Pedagogy Project. She is also Co-Founder and Research Lead of the Data Nutrition Project, which designs tools and practices for responsible AI development.
Heather Newman
Heather Newman is a scientist, entrepreneur, and ocean enthusiast. She has degrees in Biophysics from UC Berkeley and UC San Francisco, where her research focused primarily on protein structure and function in cellular lipid accumulation. She published in several peer reviewed journals about this research and helped secure a multi-million dollar NIH grant for the work. She later took a hiatus from science to work in the music industry, where she became a business owner and band manager. The rising climate crisis and her lifelong passion for the ocean have led her back to science with a focus on sustainability, marine biology, and green and blue tech solutions, where she’s now involved in research, teaching, and consulting. In addition to her passion for the ocean, science, and travel, Heather loves astrophysics, and offers science talks on a range of topics for widely varied audiences.
Eric Rodenbeck
Eric Rodenbeck is the founder of Stamen, an award-winning design and technology studio based in San Francisco, and a lecturer at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design. Under Eric’s leadership for more than twenty years, Stamen’s work has helped to define the emerging world of online mapping and data visualization. His work has appeared in the New York Times, the Atlantic, the Washington Post, Bloomberg, Vice, Scientific American, and many other publications. The Dalai Lama trusted him to make maps of what science knows about human emotions, the Getty trusted him to help tell the world about Ed Ruscha’s hundreds of thousands of automatic photographs of Los Angeles, Facebook trusted him to tell stories about human mobility during COVID, and the Audubon society trusted him to make maps of North American bird ranges in different client change scenarios. Radically interdisciplinary and collaborative, his work has been featured in galleries and museums around the world, and is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art and the Smithsonian. An amateur geometer, ink maker, fermenter and knot tyer, he has taught workshops in each of these areas and relishes the interplay between the digital and the physical, the controlled and the wild.
Sebastian Rodriguez
Sebastian Rodriguez is a researcher and engineer at metaLAB within the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University. His research explores critical surveillance and security studies, critical data studies, digital humanities, and pedagogical development. Sebastian is the lead developer of the AI Pedagogy Project, which provides open educational resources that help educators critically and creatively engage with AI in the classroom. He is also a research collaborator with the Data Nutrition Project, and an affiliate of the University of Toronto’s Failure: Learning in Progress Project, the Society for Teaching & Learning in Higher Education’s REFLECT Project, and the Manchester-Melbourne-Toronto Beyond Disinformation Research Cluster. Sebastian holds a MSc in Social Science of the Internet from the University of Oxford and a Bachelor of Information from the University of Toronto.