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Team: Lead Applicant: Theodora Vardouli, Co-applicants: Daniel Cardoso Llach (Carnegie Mellon University) and Nicolas Reeves (UQAM), Collaborator: Gabriella Aceves Sepulveda (Simon Fraser University).

Project description: How did 20th century developments in digital computation, software, displays, and hardware shape the aesthetic evolution of North-American design and architecture? How may we trace this evolution in contemporary cultures of creative practice? Before the advent of the personal computer, government and industry investment in computing research sought to propel the use of computers for manufacturing and design. Along with the new technologies, new conceptual and visual languages emerged. Through innovative, publicly engaged scholarship, “Toward a Digital Imagination” explores this period of remarkable inventiveness and traces its multidisciplinary aesthetic, material, and cultural repercussions.

The project includes an exhibition uniquely combining historical materials and contemporary artworks, scholarly presentations and workshops, and a high-quality printed catalogue. Engaging a variety of academic and non-academic audiences, it will enrich the public’s understanding of the vibrant interplay between technologies and cultures of creative practice.

A public exhibition will be hosted for two months in January 2021 at the Centre de design de l’UQAM — one of Montreal’s foremost galleries for art and design. It will showcase a unique combination of historical materials, interactive software reconstructions, and contemporary works by a selection of architects, designers, and artists experimenting with computation. The historical section of the exhibition showcases previously unseen or little known photographs, high quality reproductions, and films exploring the formative period of numerical control and computer graphics technologies between 1950 and 1980. A series of five interactive software reconstructions accompanies these historical materials, offering visitors the possibility of playfully interacting with pioneering systems for computer-aided design. Examining the influence of these technologies on present-day creative practices, the contemporary section of the exhibition showcases experimental works by Canadian and US artists, architects, and designers.

The exhibition adapts and expands “Designing the Computational Image, Imagining Computational Design”, which originated at the Miller Gallery of Contemporary Art at Carnegie Mellon University curated by co-applicant Prof. Cardoso Llach. As a result of a research collaboration with lead applicant Prof. Vardouli, the new exhibition brings into focus Canadian histories and practices of numerical control, computer graphics, and computer art in their enmeshment with architecture. Further, a symposium entitled “Digital.Visual.Material” will be held at McGill University in January 2021 bringing together scholars and practitioners of computational design from Canada, the US, and Europe.

Presentations by eminent scholars will be punctuated by hands-on workshops conducted by exhibition contributors. Finally, a high-quality reasoned catalogue, published with a widely-circulating architecture press, will document the exhibition and enrich it with brief essays and interviews.

From the playful and exploratory to the utilitarian and technical (and from historical archives to present-day practices) our project will illustrate how the expressive and functional possibilities of computational media challenged disciplinary boundaries — as well as dominant views on drawing, design, and creativity — ushering new aesthetic languages and intellectual debates. Highlighting shared practices, histories, and infrastructures that so far have remained distinct, it will offer a perspective from which we might critically reconstruct the visual, material, and intellectual histories of computation in design — and re imagine their future.

Link to the exhibition website: https://centrededesign.com/vers-un-imaginaire-numerique/

The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada has announced the results of the Insight Development Grants 2018 Competition. Happy to be among the award recipients with my research project “Architecture as Computation: Academic Research Networks and Mobilities of Technical Practices.” The SSHRC funding will allow me and my research team to build a searchable database of “design methods” (systematic theories of the design process) activity in late-1960s North American research universities, so as to visualize and examine the social, technical, and intellectual ecology that premised the computer’s introduction to architecture. Design methods cultivated a computational (step-wise, algorithmic) view of architectural design and in some cases included the first uses of computers in architecture. This research project promotes a cross-geographic and cross-disciplinary fashion with an eye for transactions and mobilities of concepts and techniques across various academic settings. The project directs attention to new modes of knowledge production and dissemination that spurred from academic architects’ work in postwar research universities, thus illuminating the development of a scientific imagination and a computational perspective for architecture. The project also pinpoints particular definitions of design as a common ground between architecture and engineering, in the context of efforts of disciplinary unification, and discusses epistemologies that catalyzed these efforts. An original aspect of this project is that it engages the Canadian context, highlighting its role in histories of design methods and computer-aided design. Stay tuned for updates.

Incredibly honoured to have received by doctoral hood from my mentor Terry Knight and my PhD diploma from President Rafael Reif. I thank Terry, my advisor George Stiny, and everyone in my MIT family for the unforgettably creative, mind-expanding, and life-shaping 7 years!

Joined the faculty at the McGill University School of Architecture as tenure-track Assistant Professor. Thrilled to be amidst excellent new colleagues and a stellar academic home!

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?

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.

Futures Past: Design and the Machine was a three-day conference on the institutional and intellectual history of research and visions for design and the machine in the second half of the 20th century, and its relationship to emerging roles of technology in design. I co-organized the conference with the excellent colleagues Olga Touloumi and Duks Koschitz, with the advisorship of Prof. Terry Knight, George Stiny, and Nicholas Negroponte. The conference was structured around conversations among protagonists of early efforts to incorporate computers, information technologies, and communications engineering in the design process, and paper sessions with scholars, researchers, and historians of these visions. Futures Past took place at the MIT Media Lab on November 2013, and gathered over 150 attendees. Among many other participants, was the MIT Architecture Machine Group (photo above) that pioneered ideas of interaction and participation in design during the 1970s.

For more information, including videos and photos of the event visit http://futurespast.info