Abstract
‘Technology Is the answer, but what was the question?’
— Cedric Price
The prevalence of ubiquitous computing offers new territories for engagement within design and technology. As the world’s resources decline and conditions of scarcity and inequality define many communities, the role of architectural design must shift towards amplifying impact. Investments in technological innovation have historically been used to augment or restore dwindling resources via efficient material productions and assemblies. In the discipline of architecture, where the use of technology has predominantly taken place within high-investment contexts, such as corporate construction, research institutions or academia, influence is often contained to a select audience, and value is predominantly placed on novelty over equity, empathy and accessibility.
However, the reach of distributed and adaptable design solutions within communities of limited resources has been equally important in shaping diverse contexts, through work that leverages existing technologies in innovative and meaningful ways. Between high and low technologies, along with ecologically focused interventions across scales, this volume includes works that aim to co-opt digital paradigms and question intrinsic metrics of their value. The selected content addresses themes of collective subjectivity, ecological ethics, social inequities, non-normative sensory and neurological ranges and environmental aesthetics, offering important connections to a different set of contexts through the application of calibrated and commodified technologies.
This issue of International Journal of Architectural Computing (IJAC) seeks to define new forms of design empathy: work that is inherently intentional, resourceful and accessible to appropriation. Moving away from an in-depth focus on computational tools and unprecedented levels of technical specificity, the editors of this issue seek to explore more eclectic introspectives on a localized impact of digital technologies across human and ecological scales.
The agency of design has gained a sense of urgency during the highly volatile global condition of the COVID-19 pandemic – during which this issue was assembled – and has rendered the impact of human activity on all ecological processes acutely visible. Along with the global economy and manufacturing standstill come cleaner skies, purer air and reemergence of wildlife, demonstrating the ability to affect climate change on a real time scale. However, as the planet heals, the systemic inequities that affect vulnerable communities continue to deepen. The implications of capitalist policies that produce social inequity are radically heightened. Moreover, the efficacy of top-down interventions has proved to be inadequate towards addressing the challenges of wealth and resource redistribution, necessitating new forms of collective, distributed, and empathetic actions. The cultivation of empathy typically benefits from direct subject-to-subject interaction: where the recipients and effects of actions are tangible and observable. The current pandemic problematizes the culturally relied upon forms of interaction, shifting responsibility onto digital proxies of physically remote tools. While global citizens connect via online platforms to perpetuate existing structures, the underserved are left behind, perhaps more violently than before. However, in an unprecedented development, technology also facilitates new forms of empathy on a planetary scale. The ubiquitous use of digital and interconnected technologies has supported the prodigious design, production and distribution of localized physical activity, such as the current PPE (personal protective equipment) three-dimensional (3D) printing initiative. (The PPE-3D printing initiative is a globally collective effort by architecture faculty who are sharing digital models, file optimization information and functionality feedback from medical professionals in order to produce vast amounts of face shields, masks, intubator boxes and respirators in the fight against the spread of Covid-19. Some initiatives include ‘Operation PPE’ by Jenny Sabin’s team at Cornell University, and Alvin Huang’s team at USC, ‘West Texas Covid-19 PPE Relief’ by Ersela Kripa’s team at TTU, Mitch McEwen’s team at Princeton, ‘ISU CCL PPE for Iowa Healthcare Workers’ by Shelby Doyle’s team at ISU, and countless others.) There is an observable impact from these collective actions that inspires new possible models for environmentally and socially empathetic practices.
This issue of IJAC offers a collection of works that recalibrate design technologies by connecting human agency with specific ecological realities across varied scales, showing impact framed by situated needs and ethics of a particular place, social system or material formation. The following essays locate possibilities for empathetic interactions between soil and robot, epidermis and sensor, micro-algae and urban growth, and attempt to cultivate global impact towards a more inclusive ecology.
Starting from the galactic scale of air flow and air pollution, Mondor’s essay, ‘Responding to the invisible: Shaping the landscapes of air quality’, contends that design agency takes root within human to technology interactions, which operate in continuities from the contact of particulate matter with lung cells to the exhaust of collective exhales into the atmosphere.
The collection of projects featured in ‘Bio-digital aesthetics as value system of post-anthropocene architecture’ by Pasquero and Polletto connect the biological life-cycle of algae from microorganism, through human breath and energy use to the current state of contemporary urban planning. The authors argue that a solution-centric blue-green urban planning produces ‘dark sites of urban ecology’ and takes advantage of poorer regions to become pollution waste zones, thus allowing the modernist urban aesthetics of sanitation and programmatic zoning to perpetuate spatial and social inequity.
Beatie’s ‘Solidarity through difference: Speculative, serious participatory urban gaming (SSP-UG)’ similarly attempts to address social inequities through innovative but speculative planning processes. Here, a gaming platform fosters a fictional participatory design process for the upgrading of slums in marginalized communities. Such a process enables stakeholders and community members to design and interact towards the development of planning strategies, exploring typically taboo social topics and resolving conflicts through playful ideation and iterative discussions.
In ‘Design for disassembly: Using temporary fabrication for land politics in the Negev’, a team of masters students from MIT with the guidance of Prof. Lawrence Sass, site their studio research within the context of a political struggle in Israel. The team utilizes a mobile CNC router to design and build temporary shelters through a collaborative process with a disenfranchised population. This research posits how to make digital design methods and tools accessible to communities, and hints at a future mobile and networked fabrication lab, where the infinite mutability of computational workflows, the permanence of digital media, and the possibility of crowdsourcing and internalizing communal knowledge can be leveraged for political struggles or disaster relief.
Digital design and fabrication processes must allow for alternatively motivated insertions of agency that do not rely on familiar product-oriented material assemblies. Sean Alqhuist, in his ‘Negotiating human engagement and the fixity of computational design’ essay, charts a pathway towards hacking feedback loops and constructing frameworks for the relocation of design agency within a truly empathetic design practice that is shaped by an expanded understanding of physical, emotional, and mental ability of expanded human sensory ranges.
At the granular material scale, Mitterberger and Derme’s work ‘Digital soil: Robotically 3D-printed granular bio-composites’ focuses on earthen-based biomaterials as a hyperlocal resource that can address the current state of industrial ecology on global CO2 production. Using robotic fabrication, this research offers cues into new formation strategies that link material sustainability to local material reuse and biodegradability, suggesting innovative frameworks that enhance ‘cradle-to-cradle’ design strategies.
Ultimately, the collection presented in this volume elicits questions to be addressed in future research. How can technology be used as a tool to engage issues of equity in design at all levels of resource availability and cultural diversity? What can we learn from working with minimal resources to challenge and redefine established thinking and methodologies? How do we measure impact both inside and outside the research and academic environment?
By using technology as a projective engagement with multiple social, cultural and material contexts, the design discipline can reorient its reach towards a true democratization of tools and a more just use of resources.
As political ideologies fail, design activism gives us hope.
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