By What Means?

Sasha Costanza-Chock’s phrase “By Any Media Necessary” refers to the growing community of practitioners and researchers that are leveraging advanced media, methods, and modalities of design toward issues of social justice, inclusivity, and environmental responsibility. A plurality of health, ecology, and society pandemics are placing a renewed focus on designers to direct and re-prioritize their work, research, and scholarship outward, beyond disciplinary boundaries. These acute circumstances call for a collective re-imagining of alternative futures that recognize interdependent socio-technical variables in design, research, practice, and pedagogy. With this issue, the International Journal of Architectural Computing asks its community to reflect upon the necessary restructuring of priorities, goals, and means within and beyond computational design that would afford a responsible direction for moving forward.

The call for efficacy and affect is more than a technological problem. It is one that is both physical and virtual, social and individual, where multiple and often competing narratives complicate the move toward accessibility, inclusivity, and equity. The path to a more equitable future is conditioned on mediacies capable of breaking boundaries and bridging distances. As Sherry Turkle’s term “alone together” reminds us, unrestrained connectedness may often bring forms of unexpected isolation. Along these mediacies comes the question of how human and/or machine relationships can be weaved and what role our disciplines can play beyond the conventional expectations of what a technical design practice is.

This issue of IJAC examines the ways projects, practices, techniques, technologies, and mediated forms of social mechanics are being reconsidered as paths toward design efficacy through the production of a shared constructed (physical or otherwise) environment. By what means should we be reconsidering, redeveloping, and reinventing design practices, design technology, and design pedagogy to address the social, ecological, and ethical challenges of today and those we will face tomorrow?

This issue offers a collection of work that investigates, explores, critiques, recalibrates, demolishes, and rebuilds from debris relationships between the designer, the machine, the occupant, and the space that are inherent to a computational architectural practice. The following essays offer new design approaches and technical methodologies for construction of robust practices that leverage the machine while centering on the human. The issue includes a wide range of areas and topics, including prototypes of space–machine–human interactions, computational tools for minimizing waste in construction, novel pedagogical strategies focusing on inclusion in digital fabrication, and integration of economy variables into the design process.

In their essay titled The Question of Access: Toward an Equitable Future of Computational Design, Vernelle A.A. Noel, Yana Boeva, and Hayri Dortdivanlioglu investigate the status quo of digital fabrication training, explicitly focusing on the issue of disconnected CAD-CAM workflows in pedagogies. They then propose an alternative pedagogy that is focusing on the development of embodied knowledges through leveraging of craft practices in combination with digital tools and machines. They stress that equity is impossible without full access which is not just physical proximity to tools and technologies, but must also consider modes of knowledge building.

In Bridging Collectives, Isla Han, Stefana Parascho, and Forrest M. Meggers contributed a review of current approaches to collective robotic construction, explicitly focusing on the meaning of the term “collective“ in relationship to potential human–machine interaction possibilities within the field. They argue that it is essential to invite the human to the front stage of the investigation and center it on possible scenarios where machines augment and assist rather than replace human workers. The essay offers an overview of existing practices, technologies, and approaches and concludes by suggesting a further investigation into how these integrate into a more human-centered workflow that not only considers the human as part of the system but also inherently impacts the broader conversation of labor automation.

Emotive Intelligent Spaces by Ghandi Mona, Blaisdell Marcus, and Ismail Mohamed offers a similarly human-centered approach, but in the context of responsive and adaptive architectural spaces. Specifically, they present a sensor method that allows to track real-time brainwave activity of users and respond to them through the movement of architectural elements in space. Throughout this technical investigation, authors inherently address the complexity of bio data collection and reliable recognition, issues of user privacy and data storage, as well as the future applications of responsive architectural objects.

Has the ubiquity of computer-controlled modes of production created a form of detachment and discontent with making, or has our relationship with this growing constellation of non-human participants repositioned design as an inescapably collaborative process, where we are not only co-creators but co-authors of our own work? In his essay Building Sympathy, Zach Cohen explores relationships with contemporary mechanisms of production, opening up new possibilities for how we conceive of, participate in, and evaluate any act of making.

In their essay Public Parts: Resocialized Autonomous Communal Life, David Doria, Keshav Ramaswami, Mollie Claypool-Glass, and Gilles Retsin present a discrete construction system accompanied with intelligent design software developed explicitly for the context of communal housing. They address the complexity of the entangled economy of construction, real estate, labor automation, and gig economy with a provocative proposal for an alternative way toward equitable autonomous communal life. Both the essay and the project take a rather political stance, urging the community to rethink their priorities and responsibilities as designers, architects, and integral members of the larger building and construction economy.

In Computational Designing Out of Waste, Matthias Haeusler and Nicole Gardner address the issue of waste at the earliest stage of the design and planning process by proposing a parametric tool for tracking material off-cuts and waste. They stress that the issues of waste, recyclability, and demolition cannot be left to post-construction and must be included in the initial design space calibration.

Finally, Drawing Afield by Erik Herrmann and Ashley Bigham asks how we might approach public processes of creative production when proximity and participation become liabilities. The resulting project, a series of field drawings, emerges through a layering of direct, recursive, and contextual operations, finding resonance simultaneously with the early work of computationalists and minimalist performance art. Successive pixelated strata are drawn into focus by both on-site observation and the distributed dissemination of drone footage, mirroring our ongoing pandemic-induced bifurcated definition of presence.

In their eclectic and varied collection of approaches, techniques, problems, solutions, and directions, all of the presented essays address the question of machine participation in the design process toward an outcome that is beyond technological achievement or a design exercise. Each of the authors has responded to the proposed IJAC provocation by addressing issues that lie on the periphery of a conventional design practice, blurring and reaching beyond the disciplinary boundaries.