The Climate Pilots seminar considers the geographic specificity of climate adaptation. Integrating scientific inquiry with design practice, it (1) examines the spatial and cultural implications of climatic impacts and effects, (2) frames problems of adaptation in terms of the built environment, and (3) develops multi-sited pilot projects to yield insights grounded in particular places. The seminar invites practitioners from a range of allied fields to collaborate in interdisciplinary research concerned with the built environment. It focuses on design problems that mediate across scales from the bioregion to the site-level. See our index, projects, and papers.

Helen Kongsgaard is an American designer. Her research situates design within the emergent field of climate adaptation and examines the concepts, methods, and practices at work as cities and regions adapt to climate change. Drawing on the disciplinary methods of design, she considers how places change (and may yet evolve) within scenarios of environmental transformation. Kongsgaard holds a Master of Landscape Architecture from the Harvard Graduate School of Design, where her research was supported by the Center for Geographic Analysis, the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.