Processing Design

Speakers
Billie Faircloth, KieranTimberlake
Mariana Ibañez, Harvard University
Quayola, visual artist
Moderated by Josh Jordan, Columbia GSAPP

Background

What is the meaning of ‘making’ in design processes?

The past two decades have brought steady and swift digitization of both the means of thinking about design and the means of production. While technology proliferates and becomes ever-more democratized, the expectation of technological expertise expands and speciates into new roles for makers.

What new intellectual activities are contemporary technologies providing for designers? What constitutes a ‘model’ in an environment where the physical and digital are increasingly congruent? Are craft and modeling still the foundations of a designer’s identity? and what does the age of digital tools and fabrication mean for design education?

Biographies

Billie Faircloth is a Partner at Kieran Timberlake Architects in Philadelphia. She leads a transdisciplinary group of professionals leveraging research, design, and problem-solving processes from fields as diverse as environmental management, chemical physics, materials science, and architecture.

Mariana Ibañez is an architect in Argentina, and Associate Professor of Architecture at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design As an academic and editor, Mariana’s research is in the disciplinary core of architecture and its growing periphery. Her recent publication by Actar D, Paradigms in Computing, is an inquiry into design agency and revitalizing its scope of work.

Josh Jordan is Manager of Digital Fabrication at GSAPP. He has served as an architecture instructor and critic at the University of Pennsylvania, and as a designer in a small, experimental architecture and digital fabrication office in Philadelphia.

Quayola is a visual artist based in London. He investigates dialogues and the unpredictable collisions, tensions and equilibriums between the real and artificial, the figurative and abstract, the old and new. His work explores photography, geometry, time-based digital sculptures and immersive audiovisual installations and performances.

Organized by Columbia GSAPP