Michael Speaks in the seminar with students from Perfromative Design and Architectures of Interdisciplinarity

As a collaboration between KTH Performative Design studio, we were happy to have Michael Speaks as a guest. The Dean of University of Kentucky, Speaks is previously known for introducing design intelligence as a source of innovation in practice, as well as introducing Dutch architecture to a wider international audience in the 1990s. He gave a public evening lecture at the KTH, and held a seminar with our two studios on the topic of design and research in teaching and practice. The events were organized by myself in collaboration with Daniel Norell of the Performative Design studio.

We were fortunate to receive additional funding from the KTH School of Architecture for this event.

Gradually shifting pattern developed in Grasshopper

Koggens gränd is one of Sweden´s first large scale, owner occupied apartment buildings, developed by White arkitekter through in-house management. At a very late stage, Dsearch was asked to develop a pattern to be applied on pre-cast concrete elements at the ground level of the building. The parametric principle allowed for a gradually shifting pattern, that would provide unique formal qualities by each individual entrance. Due to construction restraints the proposal was never completed, but the concept is presented in a comprehensive way in the doctoral thesis, where the particular prinicples for specialist / non-specialist collaboration devised in the project are explained.

The ACSA Flip Your Field advert

I presented the paper Cognitive Estrangement in Digital Design Practice at the 2010 ACSA West Central Fall Conference in Chicago. The theme of the year was Flip Your Field, implying to a return to issues explored in architectural research over the past fifteen years in order to define ten opportunities for ideological re-investment with the aim to trade up the discipline. I was part of the Versions panel, and I suggested that there is a need to link speculative design work with global issues in order to not do less experimental work, but rather more, but tied into narratives that opens up the field of exploration.

The paper suggests that there are concepts and definitions within Science Fiction studies that may be useful in order to establish frameworks for this mode of speculative design. This is a trajectory that will be continued in my forthcoming PhD thesis.

Abstract:

As the agenda of many digitally driven practices has shifted to physical fabrication and full scale production, this paper suggests that new conceptual layers need to be integrated into the design agenda. Throughout the field, architects are formulating conceptual frameworks for future development, often defined by aesthetic identity or fabrication principles, and in some cases full manifests for implementation of parametric principles in all scales of the built environment are stated. I would argue that there may be alternate ways of widening the scope of experimental digital practice by looking at fields outside of architecture all together, and I suggest that one such field is literature, in particular Science Fiction. Rather than seeing the possibility of rational fabrication as the only motivation for the full implementation of recent digital explorations, or considering the digital design field mature enough for the establishment of a common manifest, this line of thought suggests a more open framework, situated between technology and utopian thought. By looking at a number of concepts identified within Science Fiction theory, the paper proposes that a design approach in analogy with the way an SF author designs worlds to be explored through a narrative, could be a fruitful way forward as the digital design field risks either an introverted discourse or a mundane application.

Unpublished paper