Emergent Technologies end of the year AA Projects Review Exhibition 2011The Emergent Technologies and Design programme continues to evolve through the development of our research in studio, the seminar coursework and the dissertations. We aim to produce new research each year, building from our interests and expertise in material organisation and the design and development of systems in a variety of scales. This continuation of work is focused on the interdisciplinary effects of emergence, biomimetics and evolutionary computation of design and production technologies, as well as developing these as creative inputs to new architectural and urban design processes.
Building on the achievements of our past studies, we will include greater involvement from experts in the fields of component systems and material computation, urban physics and algorithmic urban design, engineering, advanced computation and computationally driven fabrication. We will continue our Masterclass series for the third year, along with lectures, tutorials and workshops from Wolf Mangelsdorf (Buro Happold), Fabian Scheurer (Design to Production), Achim Menges (ICD Stuttgart), Cristina Díaz Moreno and Efren Garcia Grinda (AMID/Cero 9), Neri Oxman (MIT), Joan Busquets (Harvard GSD) and Jan Carmeliet (Urban Physics, ETHZ).
The programme is focused on the concepts and convergent interdisciplinary effects of emergence on design and production technologies, and on developing these as creative inputs to new architectural design processes. The instruments of analysis and design in Emergent Technologies are computational processes. The seminar courses and core studio are designed to familiarise students with these instruments, their associated conceptual fields and with their application to architectural design research. The courses are extensively cross-linked, thematically and instrumentally, with each other and the core studio. In Core Studio 1 the focus is on the exploration of material systems and their development into differentiated surfaces and assemblies. These assemblies demonstrate the potential for integrated structural and environmental performance producing local ‘microclimatic’ variations that define spatial arrangement. In Core Studio 2 we investigate a larger and more complex piece of the city – examining urban systems and generating new material, social and ecological organisations.
