Category: talks

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.

I presented my article Making Use in the Computational Making Workshop that I co-organized along with Prof. Terry Knight, Dina El-Zanfaly, Daniel Cardoso Llach, Mine Ozkar, Athina Papadopoulou, and Cagri Zaman. The workshop took place at the 6th International Conference On Design Computing And Cognition (DCC ‘14), 21 June 2014, University College London, London, UK. Here is a link to the workshop papers, including mine. Apart from presentations, the workshop also included discussion groups. I lead the Making Beyond Things group, on the sociotechnical implications of making.

Workshop brief: The goal of the workshop is to articulate and circumscribe an emerging area of research we call Computational Making. Making is construed broadly here – it’s not about digital fabrication. We are interested in how our active bodies and senses participate in the making of spaces and the things in them, and the potential roles of computation in making activities. We aim in this workshop to bring together diverse perspectives on making from a range of disciplines to envision new directions and possibilities for computation in making.

I participated in the DRS2014 Conversation panel Intelligence, Interactivity, & Interfaces: Historical Approaches to Contemporary Practice, with my talk “Designing Mediations: Thermostats | Menus | Surrogates”. The panel was organized by Molly Steenson (CMU) and joined by Moa Carlsson (MIT). In my talk I explored different ways in which participatory design interfaces were conceptualized in the 1971 DRS conference, themed Design Participation, and the way that they each construed an ethical and legitimate computational mediation between the subject and the object of design. Sweden was lovely and *constantly* sunny.