Design research

Summary

Design research was originally constituted as primarily research into the process of design, developing from work in design methods, but the concept has been expanded to include research embedded within the process of design, including work concerned with the context of designing and research-based design practice. The concept retains a sense of generality, aimed at understanding and improving design processes and practices quite broadly, rather than developing domain-specific knowledge within any professional field of design. Origins Design research emerged as a recognisable field of study in the 1960s, initially marked by a conference on Design methods at Imperial College London, in 1962. It led to the founding of the Design Research Society (DRS) in 1966. John Christopher Jones (one of the initiators of the 1962 conference) founded a postgraduate Design Research Laboratory at the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology, and L. Bruce Archer supported

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How can we turn digital technologies and data into meaningful user experiences? How can we face societal issues raised by digital evolution? This course proposes an immersion in design research, user centered creativity and UX/UI psychology, through project based learning.

This is a collection of lectures on "structured innovation systems," codified approaches to stimulating and managing the process of innovation. Some of the systems to be covered may be Design Thinking, Open Innovation, Crowdsourcing, Lean Innovation, and other structured innovation systems.

This course aims to engage students into multidisciplinary collaboration to tackle real world problems with a human centered approach. It will also provide knowledge about the role of design in innovation.

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The spatial and formal conception of architecture, and thus its modes of design perception and representation, directly contributes to its machine-learnability; and consequently, its capacity in leveraging today's machine learning apparatus for design innovation. If text can be sampled and synthesized in Natural Language Processing, image in Image Processing and sound in Audio Signal Processing, how can architectural forms and spaces be likewise sampled for generating new designs? The thesis endeavours to construct such a theoretical and technical framework with the concept of architectural sampling -- defined as the exemplar-learning (pedagogical), the machinic encoding (technological) and probabilistic generation (aesthetical) of architectural forms. Foundational to this technical leap is the overcoming of architecture's own longstanding set of conceptual and perceptual assumptions, namely figure/ground, parts/whole and shapes/grammars; and replaced with one that is ontologically 'flattened', 'resolutional' and 'probabilistic'. The thesis samples precursory works from the history of architecture, alongside machine learning approaches, to build its theoretical claims; while algorithmically demonstrating and technically validating them through a series of design research projects organized according to their structural characteristics (grid, sequence and hierarchy). The contribution of the work lies in its fundamental reformulation of seeing, thinking and making architectural forms through the lens of machinic sampling.

EPFL2019

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El Portico de los Huéspedes is a pedagogical, design-research project that tests the possibility of an open-ended architecture, where duration links between past and future. It is a work of architecture as becoming: ‘work’ meaning the structure, rhythms and strategies of the effort, and ‘work’ as El Portico itself, which, in every instance, is a calling forth of what has taken place towards what could yet be. The project began in 2014 on lands along the Pacific coast of Chile and continues at annual intervals each August. The starting point was a volume defined by Gunnar Asplund’s Woodland Chapel. This volume acted as a trace that measured the landscape and allowed us to forego formal questions; the work became instead a constructive problem of erecting and articulating the volume. The project’s development from this beginning has not been determined by a fixed set of drawings. Instead, each year, the work begins anew when students encounter El Portico and the traces of time, labor, craft and thought left by those before them. Students are given a task (a plaza, walls, an enclosure, columns, a floor) that leads the project towards some additional possibility of appropriation. Working on these tasks, they draw, model and build full-scale mock-ups to test possibilities. They work in spaces nearby or, in recent years, bring drawing tables and tools under the completed roof working with the wind and winter sun. In the first year, students defined the site and erected a structural frame on wooden piles founded into the sand. The following summer, a brick plaza tied El Portico into the landscape; a secondary roof structure, also built the second year, was clad the third using inexpensive wooden siding disposed in four waterproof layers. The fourth year, three wall fragments began to suggest enclosure. This past year -- the fifth -- a possibility for habitation: an inside defined by a concave wall punctured with lean windows; a locking door, a finished floor of wood and concrete and a brick plaza just outside. In intervals between each August, other teams of students led by partners in Chile intervened: a field of concrete columns cast with fabric formwork; wooden ribs and a concrete slab that formed the shell of the wing completed this past year. The fixed nature of the tasks, rudimentary tools and the short, three-week period generate an intensity. On-site discussions of tests made in different modes and at various scales guide decisions. These decisions are also informed by the traces of the past manifest by El Portico as it is encountered in every moment, and by the work students know will continue in the years to come, by other hands; it is with this knowledge that the project is able to transmit an understanding of architecture that links past to future, bringing into presence the uncertain and open-ended potential of the life of a work and its fragility as a human endeavor.

Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture2019

This thesis assesses the surveillance operated on the mobile phone network by governmental actors (intelligence agencies, police, army) and the relationship between monitored spaces and their users. Indeed, some new surveillance devices used by intelligence services redefine surveillance spatiality raising new questions in this field of research. More specifically this research focuses on one specific object: the IMSI catcher, a monitoring apparatus of the cellular network that intercepts cellphones' identity and some communications in a given area by mimicking the activity of a cell tower. While this kind of device seems to offer a tactical and a security interest in the fight against terrorism and against crime, many civil liberties organisations such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Privacy International and _La Commission nationale de l'informatique et des libertÃ©s are concerned about the potential of an uncontrolled surveillance ; indeed, the controversial nature of the device could endanger certain individual and public rights. What is this technical object and which new issues comes with its use in surveillance? How and from which perspective is it problematic What does the IMSI catcher teaches us on the potential future of surveillance regimes? I look into this specific device case in a research framework at the intersection of design research practices, science and technology studies (STS) and surveillance studies. First, I deal with this surveillance apparatus as a technical object, from a perspective fed by the theoretical framework of concretization and technical lines proposed by Gilbert Simondon and Yves Deforge, through the analysis of a visual and technical documentation. Second, I use a research by design approach to explore certain assumptions regarding the nature of the object itself, its functioning and its "concrete" aspect â or rather "non-concrete" in the present case â with the help of approaches borrowed to reverse engineering and reconstitution, close to media archeology. Then, I explore possible opposition and protest trajectories with the help of prototypes designed with critical design and speculative design methods. Finally, through the writing of prospective scenarios, I build a design fiction that offers a synthesis, potentially subject to debate, around the IMSI catcher's uses, present and to come, and more broadly on the potential future of surveillance regimes.

EPFL2022

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Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture2019