Teaching

Sims’s teaching focuses on the social, political, and ecological aspects of technology and design. In all his classes, Sims directs attention toward the often quotidian ways in which persons, technologies and environments, and historical inequities make, sustain, and transform each other in practice. Since coming to UCSD, Sims has developed and taught undergraduate and graduate courses on “situated practices” (core theory classes required of all undergraduate majors and PhD students), graduate courses on moral economies and environmental communication, intermediate and advanced undergraduate studio courses on critical design (developed with Lilly Irani), an undergraduate course on media technologies and social movements, an undergraduate seminar that uses speculative design to explore futures for public universities, and graduate practicums on intellectual craftwork and ethnographic practice.