AFTER ARCHITECTURE:

Day01. Wednesday, July 07, 20:00-20:30 EDT

Throughout history, architects have been the individual, authorial agents of the urban built environment. However, as we shift into an era of machine intelligence, authorship has become unstable, driven by immediate and automated access to digitized cultural history, and new modes of machine-augmented cultural production.

This talk will explore a new phase for architectural design, imagining a future where authorship is disrupted and anybody is extended into the collective identity of place.

Romy is a designer, artist, and technologist based in Boston, USA. Their work involves experimenting with new media to bridge the space between the physical and the digital. She recently graduated with a Master in Design Studies in Technology from Harvard's Graduate School of Design where they learned computational & experiential design, machine learning tools, and interactive media. Romy is passionate about participatory futures, collective creativity and loves to explore these fields through speculation and computation. Since graduating, she has held a research position at the Laboratory for Design Technologies where she has been developing community co-design tools and an art installation. In parallel, she has worked as a UX designer at MathWorks where she designs educational games around the topic of bias in Data Science models. Romy is formally trained as an architect, with a Bachelor of Architecture from the American University of Beirut. Her previous professional experience includes design consultancy at Dar Group, and more recently creative technology in places like Supernormal and CannonDesign.

Elizabeth is Assistant Professor in the Practice of Architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, where she is also co-director of the Urban Stack research group within the Laboratory for Design Technologies. Her cross-disciplinary work is concerned with the application of emerging technologies in response to the challenges of the real world, receiving national and international awards for research in design technology at the intersection of design and engineering. Elizabeth is also the founding principal at Supernormal, an architecture, urban design, and research practice. Supernormal, formed out of Elizabeth's research in the Social Computing Group at the MIT Media Lab, focuses on the design of form and processes that balance contextual and cultural relevance with the contemporary imperative to scale beyond a single instance and to reach more people and urban places. Her work in both academia and practice explores the deep cultural, social, and process-based implications of large data sets and scalable systems to encounter the challenging natural and social challenges of the 21st century built environment.