Automated system test schedule

Abstract

Interesting cross-fertilising projects have been recently emerging at the crossroads of design disciplines and Science and Technology Studies (STS): with STS becoming inspired to experiment with the methodological inventiveness of the former (expanding ethnographic repertoires), and design and architectural research increasingly captivated by the conceptual and descriptive attentiveness to material processes and their politics of the latter. Inhabiting this crossroads in different positions – due to both professional training, personal interest, and particular working appointments – both authors have felt impelled to explore what this crossroads might offer to rethink the pedagogy of architecture: Indeed, in the last years, an experimental agenda has unfolded, whereby STS’s anti-technocratic stance – its concern for the plurality of knowledge beyond those of experts, and the potential impact of neglected actors in the articulation of given socio-material assemblages – has particularly inspired relevant conceptual and practical explorations in design studio projects in a web of practitioners at the schools of Architecture in Alicante and Munich. Beyond architectural solutionism, these experimental briefs have revolved around particular more-than-human challenges provoking a crisis in conventional methods and means of design, hence speculating what architectural practice might turn into when put in crisis, re-learning its ways from a variety of agents who are usually not taken into account. Drawing from this, both authors engaged in developing a joint auto-pedagogical programme, developed since late 2019. Our contribution will describe in detail an exploration into what neurodiversity could teach to architecture. For this, we will show speculative and provisional results of how our concern with the embodied knowledge of neurodiverse people and their atmospheric spatial practices led to a series of pedagogical experiments, whereby we could address its impact not only on the processes, materials, and devices of design practice, but also on the conventional ocular-centric and volumetric visual culture of architecture.