People-Space Analytics: Case Study of Work Dynamics

To deliver an innovative design, architects often need to innovate in the ways they empathize with and understand the user. In his 1994 essay, the American Pragmatist philosopher Richard Rorty writes that “one should stop worrying about whether what one believes is well-grounded and start worrying about whether one has been imaginative enough to think up interesting alternatives to one’s present beliefs”1. This study, primarily, explores an interdisciplinary approach in which data collection, analysis, and interpretation are used as drivers of inspiration as well as tools of validation. A combination of tools and techniques labeled as people-space analytics was used to investigate the socio-spatial dynamics of work in the workplace of a national architecture firm. The results were later interpreted from a certain lens in the community of practice theory. A secondary goal of this research project is to study how workplace’s spatial configuration and key people and places are involved in organizational learning and knowledge practices. Therefore, a set of metrics and measures were used to interpret different employees’ recurrent patterns of communication and flow of information between people from different social networks in a spatial context."

The Building Genome Project: Indentify faults in building energy performance

This paper explores the use of new tools for the creation of novel methods of identifying faults in building energy performance remotely. With the rise in availability of interval utility data and the proliferation of machine learning processes, new methods are arising which promise to bridge the gap between architects, engineers, auditors, operators, and utility personnel. Utility use information, viewed with sufficient granularity, can offer a sort of “genome, ”that is a set of “genes” which are unique to a given building and can be decoded to provide information about the building’s performance. The applications of algorithms to a large data set of these “genomes” can identify patterns across many buildings, providing the opportunity for identifying mechanical faults in a much larger sample of buildings that could previously be evaluated using traditional methods.

Research-Based Design and Green Buildings: Interdisciplinary Collaboration Between Students, Faculty and Practitioners

Over the past five years, faculty in the School of Architecture at Portland State University have been awarded four grants totaling over $1,000,000 to transform green building education with an emphasis on interdisciplinary experiences, research-based design and collaboration with practice. This paper highlights the progress and lessons learned from three interrelated programs: the Research-based Design Initiative, the Building Science Lab to Advance Teaching and the Green Building Scholars Program. Issues discussed include barriers to conducting collaborative green building research between the academy and practice, the challenges of interdisciplinary coursework, and how these programs could be a model for other universities."

Prototyping in Glass: Two-years of Collaboration with the Corning Museum of Glass

This paper documents two years of collaboration with the Corning Museum of Glass (CMoG), where two groups of graduate architecture students lead by a team of two faculty members, were able to develop projects – architectural glass components – in consultation with glassblowing experts and the resident material scientist at CMoG, and ultimately participate in the fabrication of the prototypes at CMoG’s world class glassblowing facility, GlassLab."

Buoyant Ecologies: Research, Collaboration, and Resilience at the Edge

Buoyant Ecologies is a collaborative research platform that brings together architects, marine ecologists, and fabricators to address the implications of sea level rise through innovative approaches to designing and constructing resilient waterfront structures. This paper describes how the project’s unique collaborative structure incorporates expertise from ecological researchers and industry manufacturers to promote recursive, interdisciplinary feedback loops between speculative thinking and pragmatic knowledge.

By Proxy: Design Problems and Collaborative Inquiry

Running parallel with the increase in partnered research initiatives in the fields of technology, medicine, and engineering, collaborations between private sector commercial or research organizations and academia are on the rise in architecture. There has been a recognition particularly in the last ten years of the value of incorporating design thinking into problem-solving across scales and industries. From focused material investigations to long-term strategic planning, those outside of academia are looking to architects and spatial designers to leverage their approaches and processes to address real world issues faced by communities, organizations, and businesses. Universities use these partnerships to fund research, offset capital expenses, and expand their influence. But these partnered research initiatives do not come without costs. The responsibility for companies and organizations is to see a return on their investment. Consequently, for universities, the academic freedom and maintaining of a clear pedagogy can be met with pushback. In addition, project goals and values do not always align, and expectations between partners can vary. This paper examines a number of strategies that address the inherent tension in partnered research design projects by reconfiguring stated problems into proxy inquiries. Proxies, as stand-ins for another - a person, an organization, an action or a process - allow for existing problems to be reconstructed into pedagogical ones - they allow for scales to be shifted and they generate holistic outcomes in the truncated duration of a semester, rather than offer piecemeal results. Proxies offer a methodology for accepting the constraints of partnered research as a way of expanding design inquiry, while remaining grounded in problems fundamental to architecture and design. More than just a substitute, proxies transmit agency. Outlined in the paper are findings from the Proxy Series, which began in 2007 as a set of research based academic inquiries focused on the exploration of emerging technologies and their reshaping of 1) design theory, 2) design process, and 3) design production. Conducted through studios, seminars, and independent research, each inquiry investigated a discrete set of issues spanning these three areas. While each is constructed to address a specific design problem within a pedagogical framework, the imposition of extra-academic considerations allowed for the pursuit of production techniques, materials research, and software experimentation, while working with partners and collaborators outside of the design discipline. As such, proxies offered an alternative formulation of the design life-cycle - one that emerged and evolved beyond conventional forms of practice or current problem solving approaches, while mirroring the aspirations of the partnered research model itself."

Hypermodels: An Exploration of New Media Environments and Expansive Representation of Architecture

With the advent of new digital media technologies offering immersive virtual environments have emerged new modes of architectural representation. How, in turn, can these technologies shape the less visible, and visual, aspects of architectural production? This paper considers such digital, immersive technologies as Mixed, Virtual, and Augmented Reality within the historical and theoretical context of digital media to better understand their function in charting a frontier for the three dimensional representation of architecture. I propose the notion of the hypermodel, a “hypertext version” of digital models that contains and “opens up” to more than the physical parts of a building. Hyper model is a connector of digital space and the physical world— represented via multiple forms of media—revealing the temporal expanse and informational depth of the virtual beyond the bounds of an architectural artifact. In this sense, the new medium also hints at and allows for novel collaborative methods. The new language of design and communication at work in the mixed reality medium is itself interconnected — it reflects and reinforces the inter-disciplinary and inter-media nature of architectural production today.