Author: theodora vardouli

talks

“Disciplines in Transition” Session at the 3 Societies Meeting, Faculty of the Arts, University of Alberta

Post author By theodora vardouli
Post date June 25, 2016

I co-organized the session Disciplines in Transition: Postwar Encounters Between Design, Mathematics and Engineering, in the 2016 BSHS, CSHPS, and HSS joint Meeting at the University of Alberta. The session interrogated disciplinary osmoses between design, engineering, and the mathematical sciences after the Second World War with papers by Daniel Cardoso Llach, Clare Kim (session co-organizer) and myself, and an astute commentary by John Harwood. Daniel Cardoso’s presentation Maps Laced With Data: Designing the Computational Image, Imagining Computational Design, 1959-1970 tracked the theories about design formulated by engineers and mathematicians working in the Computer-Aided Design Project. Looking beyond the university setting, Clare Kim’s paper Mathematics Meets Design: Ray and Charles Eames and the Aesthetics of the Mathematica Exhibit considered the design-influenced interpretation of mathematical theories that emerged in postwar museum exhibits. Investigating influences of mathematics and computation to design theory, my paper “To See in a Hard Intellectual Light”: Graph Theory and Design Theory in the LUBFS Centre examined the uses and meanings of graph theory within the scientizing and rationalizing work of the LUBFS Centre in the early 1970s.

publications

Paper on constructions of the user in the history of design research in DRS2016 Proceedings

Post author By theodora vardouli
Post date March 17, 2016

Cite this paper: Vardouli, T. (2016). User Design: Constructions of the “user” in the history of design research. Proceedings of DRS 2016, Design Research Society 50th Anniversary Conference. Brighton, UK, 27–30 June 2016.

Abstract: Over the past 50 years of design research, the “user” has been consistently invoked as a measure of good design and as driver of design decisions. As scholars have variously recognized, the focus of design has in turn been displaced from physical objects to relationships between things/environments and their future users/occupants. In this paper I identify, compare, and critically analyze different techniques for anticipating or understanding such relationships drawing from original material produced in the context of the design methods movement, the Design Research Society (DRS), and the Environmental Design Research Association (EDRA). I combine this material with histories of ergonomics that preceded these organizations’ founding and a brief commentary on contemporary user-centered design (UCD) methods. This paper contributes a comprehensive comparative review of user-oriented design methods, alongside a critical outlook on continuities and ruptures between quantitative and qualitative figurations of the user in the history of design research.

You can access the full paper here.

publications

“Making Use” article published in Computational Making Special Issue, Design Studies journal

Post author By theodora vardouli
Post date November 15, 2015

My article “Making Use: Attitudes to Human-Artifact Engagements” was published after double blind peer review in the Special Issue on Computational Making of the Design Studies journal, that I co-edited with Prof. Terry Knight. You can view the Special Issue’s seven original research papers and Editorial by following this link. For those interested in user-centered and participatory design, take a look at ginger coons’ and Matt Ratto’s (U. Toronto) paper on prosthetics and grease pencils, and my article on theories of function and use. In my article I discuss two key concepts in participatory design and design theory at large: function and use.

Abstract: “Function” and “use” are keywords that design researchers customarily employ when referring to human-artifact engagements. However, there is little consensus about how the concepts of function and use relate to each other, to the intentions of “designers” and “users”, or to their actions and encompassing contexts. In this paper, I synthesize literature from design research, material culture studies, design anthropology, and function theory in order to critically compare different attitudes to human-artifact engagements, implicit in characterizations of function and use. I identify design-centric, communicative, and use-centric attitudes, and discuss their assumptions and implications for design theory. I conclude by outlining principles for theoretically and computationally approaching use as an embodied and temporally contingent process – as a form of “making”.

You can access the full paper with login credentials from the Design Studies website by following this link.

talks

Invited talk on graph theory & design theory, 1960-1975 at the MIT SMArchS Colloquium

Post author By theodora vardouli
Post date October 1, 2015

I was invited as one of the speakers at the fall 2015 MIT SMArchS Colloquium. My talk ‘For every field which has some structure’: Graph Theory & Design Theory, 1960-1975 was a synopsis of my ongoing PhD research on design theory and structural mathematical ideas in the 1960s and 1970s. I will be posting a video as soon as it becomes available online. Many thanks to Timothy Hyde for the invitation and to all the participants for a great discussion!

talks

“The Combinatorics of Architectural Democracy” at the DHS2015, San Francisco

Post author By theodora vardouli
Post date September 11, 2015

I participated in the 2015 Design History Society Conference panel Computing Futures: Three Episodes in the Postwar Imagination of Design with my paper “The Combinatorics of Architectural Democracy: An Episode in the Life of a Mathematical Object”. The panel was organized by Daniel Cardoso Llach (CMU) and joined by Molly Steenson (MIT). In my talk I explored the function of graph theory in Yona Friedman’s participatory design propositions.

Abstract: In 1964 renowned utopian architect Yona Friedman left the drawing board to dedicate himself to a kind of theoretical and mathematical askesis. Instead of architectural drawings, Pour Une Architecture Scientifique (the 1971 book that marked the culmination of Friedman’s endeavors) featured numerous hand-drawn portraits of graphs – mathematical entities consisting of lines, points, and labels. Friedman tasked these entities with “remodeling” the process of architectural design, reforming the designers’ professional identity on the basis of scientific ideals, and granting the “future users” of domestic and urban spaces the power to choose and change their living environments. By following the graph in Friedman’s texts and their respective production contexts, I trace the modes by which the graph’s fluctuating mathematical, epistemic, and cultural properties generated thinking about design, ultimately bridging scientizing with democratizing visions.

teaching

Formal Systems studio, Pratt Institute

Post author By theodora vardouli
Post date September 11, 2015

First year undergraduate design studio that I taught as Visiting Assistant Professor in the Pratt Institute School of Architecture. The studio was coordinated by Duks Koschitz and included short design exercises in addition, subdivision, intersection, hybridization with lines, planes, and volumes, followed by a longer final project in which the students translated these formal operations into architectural space.

news

Computational Mediations Lecture Series, MIT

Post author By theodora vardouli
Post date September 1, 2015
No Comments on Computational Mediations Lecture Series, MIT

Computational Mediations is a lecture series at MIT that I organized with the advisorship of Terry Knight and on behalf of the Design and Computation Group. The lectures ran during the fall 2015 and spring 2016 academic terms. The Computational Mediations series probes new modalities of action, agency, and expression emerging from the confluence of human intentionality with the properties of computational technologies. The series brings together designers, media theorists, philosophers, and science and technology studies scholars, to contemplate computational technologies as media and interrogate their mediating effects on human creative endeavors. Collectively, invitees will address questions such as: How does computation (digital or non-digital) impact processes of design and making? What is the role of design and designers in orchestrating new kinds of human-technology relationships ‒relationships that promote engagement and participation? Can mediation itself become a locus of design?

phd, MIT Design and Computation

PhD Proposal Defense: “Graphing Theory: New Mathematics, Design, and the Participatory Turn”

Post author By theodora vardouli
Post date March 9, 2015

How can we retell the history and rethink the present of participatory design theory by looking at the technical device that its first manifestations rely on? This is the question that I ask in my MIT dissertation (Major: Design and Computation, Minor: Science and Technology Studies), the proposal for which I defended on March 9, 2015. I am privileged to have the guidance of brilliant people: my advisor George Stiny, and my readers Terry Knight, Natasha Schull, and Timothy Hyde. In my dissertation I am writing on transformations of design theory in the 1960s-1970s effected on the basis of computational (formal and mathematical) techniques, across sites in Europe and North America. I am looking into the meanings and circulation of structural and relational mathematical ideas in early design research so as to provide an alternative historical and critical account of the emergence of user-centric and participatory perspectives in design. Stay tuned for updates.

Dissertation Abstract:

In the 1960s and 1970s the design disciplines were marked by fervent theoretical and methodological activity performed on the basis of computational (mathematical and formal) techniques. Despite burgeoning scholarly interest in these early touch-points between design and computation, the role of specific mathematical techniques in the making and circulation of novel design theories and methods remains largely uncharted. With the aspiration to activate analytical and critical opportunities, I shift attention to a particular kind of mathematics that enjoyed wide currency in the nascent field of “design research” in the 1960s and 1970s and use it as lens through which to look at theoretical and methodological transformations that transpired in design.

The protagonist of my story is a type of applied relational mathematics that formed the computational substrate of many new design theories and methods developed during that period: graph theory. I will examine how the structural and relational mathematical properties of the graph, and their associated cultural meanings, made it available to and relevant for designers. I will also investigate how these properties generated thinking about design as a discipline and the roles of its participating subjects – both designers and users.

• In Section I: New Mathematics I will account for the modernizing and unifying visions that structural and relational mathematics came to evoke across disciplines in the 1950s-1960s, and how these visions qualified graph theory in US and European research universities.

• In Section II: Design, I will trace intellectual and institutional conditions that motivated designers operating in academic settings to seek mathematical rigor, and will unearth discipline-specific meanings that designers attributed to science and rationality in the 1960s.

• In Section III: The Participatory Turn, I will study a series of cases that employed graph theory to compute relationships between “users” and the physical form of objects, buildings, or cities. I will interrogate the role of three properties of graphs (predictivity, isomorphism, combinatorics) in enabling a continuous transition from scientizing propositions about design in the 1960s to participatory design theories and methods in the 1970s.

Through this inquiry I will show that despite discontinuity in terms of agendas, the “scientific sixties” and the “participatory seventies” present striking similarities in terms of concepts and computational techniques – both products of a short lived engagement of designers with structural and relational mathematics. By acknowledging this conceptual and technical continuity, I will open possibilities for critiquing conceptual biases that persist in contemporary understandings of “user-centric” design, and for rethinking its computational implementations.

publications

Book chapter on technological mediation in design participation

Post author By theodora vardouli
Post date February 15, 2015

My chapter “Who Designs?: Technological Mediation in Design Participation” was published in David Bihanic’s edited volume Empowering Users Through Design (Springer, 2015), among excellent contributions on user empowerment and service design.

Abstract: This chapter engages the idea that instead of trying to satisfy the users’ elusive particularities, designers should offer them tools to create their own designs. From the 1970s speculations on computational techniques for user participation in design, to current design for design empowerment endeavors, technological renderings of this idea do not escape controversy around the delivery of their empowering claims. The question remains: Who designs? The “empowered” users? The tools and/or techniques that facilitate the process? The designer of the tools and/or techniques? I propose that technological mediation, construed here as the mode of agency distribution among users, technologies, and their designers, provides a productive viewpoint from which to analyze and critique techno-centric proposals of design for user empowerment. With this hypothesis as point of departure, I offer a parallel reading of proposals for technologically mediated user participation in design, presented in the 1971 “Design Participation” conference of the Design Research Society, and recent theorizations of technological mediation in science and technology studies (STS) and the philosophy of technology.

You can purchase an electronic copy of the book via the Springer site. You can download a free copy of my chapter by following this link.

news

“Making Things and Beyond” research project launched at the MIT Computational Making Group

Post author By theodora vardouli
Post date September 1, 2014

I just launched my research project Making Things and Beyond, as part of the MIT Computational Making Research Group. In this project I ask: How can “making” – construed broadly as a new attitude for looking at active and productive human engagements with the world – help rethink key concepts in design theory and design research? Part of my research is focused specifically on ideas of use, usability, and participation. More details here.