Category: publications

Citation: Vardouli T and David Theodore, “Walking instead of Working: Space Allocation, Automatic Architecture, and the Abstraction of Hospital Labor,” in IEEE Annals of the History of Computing [Early Access] doi: 10.1109/MAHC.2020.2990111

Abstract: “Space allocation” was a central pursuit in postwar research on computing and architecture. Researchers sought an algorithm that could automatically design the most efficient floor plan for a set of activities. In this article, we connect an early algorithm for computing architectural floor plans to the postwar British hospital. We examine how researchers adapted algorithmic methods for floor layout design developed in industrial capitalist settings in the promotion of the British welfare state. Finally, we pay special attention to the agency that certain graphic inscriptions borrowed from mathematics had in validating these particular algorithmic methods as promising avenues for the algorithmic automation of all architectural work. This article situates the automation of hospital design in postwar U.K. at the intersection of building science and healthcare
management, with the aim to contribute critical perspectives on algorithmic reifications of work in early computer-aided architectural design systems.

Link: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/9080089

Citation: Vardouli T “Skeletons, Shapes, and the Shift from Surface to Structure in Architectural Geometry.” Nexus Network Journal 22, pp. 487–505.

Abstract: Architects that digitally manipulate geometry confront a rift between what is being displayed on the screen (metric shapes) and what is being computed (their non-metric skeletons). This article critically reads this relationship between surface appearance and abstract structure against a historical backdrop of changing attitudes toward the visual world in postwar architectural and mathematical cultures. First, it examines skeletal (graph theoretic) representations of floor plan geometry advanced in centres of architectural research at the University of Cambridge and the Open University. Then, it interprets this work’s technical and discursive outputs in the context of contemporaneous disciplinary and pedagogical debates around geometry in British mathematics. By positioning skeletons (graphs) in a genealogy of ambivalence toward concrete appearance, this article seeks to activate critical historical perspectives on descriptions of geometry currently reified in computer software.    

Link: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00004-020-00478-0

Citation: Vardouli T and Olga Touloumi (eds.). 2020. Computer Architectures: Constructing the Common Ground. Routledge Research in Design, Technology and Society Series.

Vardouli and Touloumi Interview with the New Books Network: https://megaphone.link/LIT6952420790

Book description:

Computer Architectures is a collection of multidisciplinary historical works unearthing sites, concepts, and concerns that catalyzed the cross-contamination of computers and architecture in the mid-20th century.

Weaving together intellectual, social, cultural, and material histories, this book paints the landscape that brought computing into the imagination, production, and management of the built environment, whilst foregrounding the impact of architecture in shaping technological development. The book is organized into sections corresponding to the classic von Neumann diagram for computer architecture: program (control unit), storage (memory), input/output and computation (arithmetic/logic unit), each acting as a quasi-material category for parsing debates among architects, engineers, mathematicians, and technologists. Collectively, authors bring forth the striking homologies between a computer program and an architectural program, a wall and an interface, computer memory and storage architectures, structures of mathematics and structures of things. The collection initiates new histories of knowledge and technology production that turn an eye toward disciplinary fusions and their institutional and intellectual drives.

Constructing the common ground between design and computing, this collection addresses audiences working at the nexus of design, technology, and society, including historians and practitioners of design and architecture, science and technology scholars, and media studies scholars.

Available as a free e-book in most university libraries

Purchase link: https://www.routledge.com/Computer-Architectures-Constructing-the-Common-Ground-1st-Edition/Vardouli-Touloumi/p/book/9780815396529

Citation: Martin Bressani, Mario Carpo, Reinhold Martin, Antoine Picon et Theodora Vardouli, «L’architecture à l’heure du numérique, des algorithmes au projet», Perspective [En ligne], 2 | 2019, mis en ligne le 30 juin 2020, consulté le 04 mai 2020. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/perspective/14830 ; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/perspective.14830

Greek Translation for Archetype.gr, by Rodanthi Vardouli:

Part A: https://www.archetype.gr/blog/arthro/i-architektoniki-stin-psifiaki-epochi-apo-tous-algorithmous-sto-kataskeuasmeno-ergo

Part B: https://www.archetype.gr/blog/arthro/i-architektoniki-stin-psifiaki-epochi-apo-tous-algorithmous-sto-kataskeuasmeno-ergo-2

Citation: Vardouli T. “Review of Roberto Bottazzi’s Digital Architecture Before Computers: Fragments of a Cultural History of Computational Design”. Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 78(4)(December 2019).

Link: https://online.ucpress.edu/jsah/article/78/4/496/106979/Review-Digital-Architecture-beyond-Computers

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.

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.

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.

 

I presented my paper Performed by and Performative for: Rethinking computational models for user participation in design at the ECAADE2013 Conference in Delft. The conference was themed Computation and Performance.

Abstract: In this paper I identify the “infrastructure model” as the predominant approach to computationally mediated participatory design from the 1960s until the present, and discuss its history, conceptual underpinnings, and limitations. As case studies for this analysis, I use the French-based architect Yona Friedman’s and the MIT Architecture  Machine Group’s 1970s proposals for participatory design computational systems. I employ the polysemic notion of “performance” to interrogate the two systems in three levels: What rationale supports the authors’ claims that in order for design to well  perform for its future users, it should be performed by them? What computational models are developed to enable users to perform their own designs? How can performance, as an intuitive, improvisational process, be used to criticize the traditional models of computation in design participation and devise new computational agendas?

For a copy of the article please click here.

My Master’s thesis is now online on MIT’s DSpace. You can access the open public view here.
Citation: Vardouli, T, 2012, Design-for-Empowerment-for-Design: Computational Structures for Design Democratization, MSc Thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Architecture.

Abstract: The vision to engage non-architects in the design of their habitat through the mediation of computer aids, dates back to the early computational era (1960s-1970s) and is currently being recast under cyber-cultural and technological influences. The computational tools enabling this architectural do-it-yourself-ism have been traditionally conceptualized as mediating “infrastructures:” neutral and non-defining control systems, which ensure the validity of the designs produced by the non-expert users without distorting their personal hypotheses. Through a critical comparative analysis of two basal computational systems for design “democratization,” as discussed in Yona Friedman’s and Nicholas Negroponte’s early 1970s writings, this thesis illustrates that the “infrastructure” metaphor was engendered and still resides in a positivist paradigm of design, allowing for little freedom or intuition on behalf of the user. Rather than denouncing the internal contradictions of the “structure for freedom” model, this thesis inquires into the computational structures of Friedman’s and Negroponte’s proto-computational proposals in order to identify and critique the assumptions which underpin their optimism about the non-paternalistic character of their control systems. By exposing the discursive role of the internal workings of the two systems in their authors’ arguments, along with their cultural and historical biases, this research aims to problematize inherited approaches to computational tools for user empowerment in design which persist until the present, and to hint to new programmatic agendas.