Remy the cat has been a fixture of the Harvard campus for years. An official resident of a nearby Cambridge home, the 8-year-old orange tabby has taken to wandering through academic buildings and libraries, making friends with students and faculty alike.
He’s also grown a sizable social media following — thousands of followers wait for snaps of him submitted by users of Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter. The deeper implications of that following, along with questions about the influence of the physical campus on Remy’s everyday movements, were among the issues that students at the Graduate School of Design explored in the four-week class “The Psychogeography of Remy.”
Led by the graduate student Sonia Sobrino Ralston, who is pursuing a master’s in landscape architecture, the Wintersession course gave students a chance to broaden their perspectives outside of design fundamentals.
“I thought Remy would be a great way to think about all the different beings that we live with,” Ralston said. “To try to break down some of the main areas of research that are happening in designing for nonhuman animals.”