Society. Spaces. Screens

Abstract

Walk into most any architect’s office anywhere in the world today and you are likely to find workers sitting in front of a computer running some form of computer aided design software. The combined social, technological, and spatial organizations of design practice built around this interface carry with them an implicit set of values relative to labor, knowledge, and ultimately design. As such, this paper argues, these organizations are in fact objects of design, if often only implicitly. Further it argues that because these organizations shape both the work experience of designers as well as help inform the range of design possibilities architects and their clients consider, they should be explicitly taken up as a focus of creative design activity, particularly in light of changing techno-social relations associated with increasingly cloud-based design platforms or the rise of remote work. To support this argument, the paper will draw on a combination of historical research into efforts by architects to design their design practices plus the spaces meant to support these practices with the work undertaken by students in a recent design studio set around the question of what spatial and organizational forms future design practice might take. Situating itself at the intersection of these real histories and speculative futures, the paper offers a provisional vocabulary for critically examining and articulating the value propositions of present-day design practice, the way it engages emerging technologies, and the imaginations of spatial possibility that it embodies.