PhD Colloquium 2021 - Abstracts

Angela Ruth Kivle – Diverse practices to uncover perspectives of justice in the restoration of urban rivers

This paper outlines the diverse practices used to uncover perspectives of justice emerging in a government-led initiative to restore, and ‘daylight’ the Alna River. River daylighting projects are part of a changing discourse in Oslo’s urban landscapes, both conceptualised within the landscape ecological planning and design spheres and seen unfolding across the city today. However, there is little empirical research into the ways designers shape the overall distribution of those social, and material benefits that water in the urban public realm provides; particularly, for vulnerable groups. This paper argues for the visual practice of cartographic mapping in collaboration with methods towards the subjective end of the spectrum, as a way of deriving insight into the emergence of justice discourses in the Grorud Park and Dam remediation. The proposed contribution is a new framework that unites bifurcations in landscape design and planning, to further interdisciplinary perspectives within dominant, positivist-driven paradigms.

Duan Zhipeng - Professionalized Designing in-between Plural Makings

Everybody is a designer. This emergent expression appeals to the autonomy of people in designing and redesigning their existence and futures. However, without careful examinations of the colonial legacies, instituting everybody as a designer may encourage the practices of “mass” designers isomorphic to the design professions. This paper wishes to evoke more imaginations of how designing relates to other makings practices while not fully rendering them as designing. Here, the general term “making” is employed to indicate a scope emphasizing the richness of divergent practices of forming, causing, doing, or coming into being, where designing is only one or several modes of making. In this chapter, I will first present three approaches about how the discourse and narrative of design professions over-occupy makings through literature review. This is followed by an autoethnography to illustrate how multiple practices of makings make the transformative change and enhance the hegemony in a “design” project of remote care that I was involved. Based on the reflection of the ethnography, this chapter concludes by considering how design professions can join in the ongoing meshwork of makings.

Corbin Raymond – Framing Scenario Thinking by Design

Relational and qualitative methodologies in transdisciplinary Design inquiry need to clarify conceptual and ideational dynamics. This is crucial in the context of complex, emergent and urgent matters of climate change, sustainability, and collective citizenship. Transdisciplinarily, my research intersects between design, anticipation, foresight and systems design studies. It focuses on how scenario thinking relates to the formation of anticipation by design and foresight. The contexts are social and environmental concerns of access to clean and safe water, informed by processes and activities of a local NGO, companies and communities in Stellenbosch, South Africa. Methodologically, I draw on and critique work on explorative and compositional methodology by Celia Lury (2020) in Problem Spaces. Compositional methodology describes problem spaces as framing concerns, and how basic design techniques – making and transforming the topologies of material semiotics - generate ways of thinking about and with the complexities of problem spaces through making as apparatus. In a first phase of work, I use compositional methodology to think about and frame scenario as an anticipatory approach that positions design in an anticipatory solution space. My methods include reflexive drawings, modelling, diagrammatizing and visualization techniques as ‘relational diagramming’. I argue that these framings may be are connected via a second research phase of processes and participation in scenario building for long term sustainable collaborative futures.

Hannes Zander - Framing Landscape as a Productive Medium to Approach Complex Geographies of Socio-Environmental Entanglements

The third chapter of my thesis titled “Economic Development and Environmental Degradation: A Dialectic Reading of the Hexi Corridor in China’s Northwestern Gansu Province” frames a ‘landscape approach’ as a productive strategy to engage with complex territories across scales and including social, economic, political, and environmental dimensions. Building on literature from critical geography, urban theory, and anthropogenic ecology, a research framework is defined that allows to contextualize specific places in their territorial context. The ‘landscape approach’ is based on the understanding that human activities are deeply entangled with and dependent on extra-human nature. It argues that through the multi-layered reading of a place and the systematic coupling of social and environmental systems, specific interventions in the form of holistic, nature-based solutions can be proposed for long-term land conservation and sustainable development. The arid Hexi Corridor region in northwestern China’s Gansu province serves as a case study for the thesis.

Haley Fitzpatrick - Worldviews of human-nature interconnectedness: an actionable literature review

Despite advances in sustainability science, there lacks widespread action to address complex “wicked" problems. Scholars argue for greater understanding of the root causes, i.e, worldviews that shape humans’ relationships to nature. However, there lacks integrated discussion on how these relationships vary across worldviews, which are based on different disciplines, cultures, and real-world praxis. To address this gap, this paper reviews literature on worldviews related to sustainability and how human-nature interconnectedness (HNIC) is conceptualized. A database search and grey literature review resulted in the following key themes: embracing uncertainty and complexity; championing holistic, rather than categorical worldviews; diversifying ways of knowing; expanding worldviews through (un)learning; and pluralizing practices of transformative action. This paper synthesizes transdisciplinary concepts into clear clusters and offers a rare, common forum that integrates a wide array of worldviews of HNIC. The author offers a new “zoom out” didactic that links the process of expanding worldviews with building consensus on real-world action.

Håvard Breivik-Khan – The Concept of Place in Displacement Management

The concept of ‘place’ increasingly appears in literature produced by and for actors of global displacement management relating to interventions concerning the built environment. ‘Place’, in this context, is presented as a concept appropriate for interventions in especially urban, non-camp settings. The introduction of so-called ‘place-based’ approaches indicates that displacement management literature builds on existing conceptualizations of place found in the practice and theory of architecture and urbanism, as well as in other social science literature. A study of operational displacement management literature reveals that the varying conceptions of place applies place thinking to displacement management in particular ways. This analysis finds that diverse uses of place-related terminology and contested ideas of placemaking, contributes to a ‘de-professionalization’ of design matters in displacement management. Nonetheless, it suggests that place can be a useful concept when combining technical site analyses with urbanism mapping methods in displacement management practice. The perspectives identified in this paper seek to strengthen the existing yet tenuous links between competencies within displacement management and architecture and urbanism. It is also meant to call attention to the social agency of displaced populations concerning built environment interventions.

Luis Callejas  - Enclosures: The forest, the desert and the island

Over the past decade, the work developed in our office has explored how a modelled landscape is of a higher order of importance than real sites. The situation for a project is the constructed model, the artificial and edited survey of a site; therefore, site visits behave more like late means of verification than early primordial inspiration. The reality of the project is thus the artificial space constructed from our long distance surveys, which not only serve as a portrait and the reality of a site, but also contain the key geometric inclinations and formal tendencies that later become the clues for architecture. The need to experience a site to be qualified to modify it, or design for it, is prevalent among architects and landscape architects, but the reality of most projects is that the early steps of design happen by editing a topographical survey constructed by someone else. The methods for constructing a long-distance poetic and pragmatic survey of three different landscape types are at the centre of the thesis.

Each canonical landscape type is described through the lens of a specific survey technique particularly adapted to explore a dominant ground condition from a distance. The techniques are evaluated both in terms of their possibilities to achieve original results and their artistic merit beyond the architectural outputs. The three canonical enclosure situations explored in the thesis are The forest clearing archetype, The desert’s false isotropy, and the island as edge landscape. Each of these explorations informs an ongoing project in a forest clearing in the Andes. The plasticity of scale in the resulting drawings informs design acts that range from largest scale to small architectural details. 

Jonathan Romm - INSIDE HEALTHCARE DESIGN LABS - Exploring the practice of healthcare service design in the context of embedded service design labs

The complex characteristics of healthcare systems and wicked nature of problems that arise in such settings can challenge service design practice to develop new methods and ways of working. Recently, design labs have emerged in the area of healthcare as a way to support service design practices carried out in such settings. This thesis explores how service design labs may act as supportive spaces for practicing service design inside large healthcare service systems. To do so, four 10–12-week-long action research interventions that supported inquiry into real-life service design processes were carried out inside three large Norwegian hospitals. This research explicates the compound approaches used by service design practitioners amid the complexities inevitably found in healthcare. It identifies and explicates the central healthcare service design conversation and facilitation practices. Further, it builds a theoretical frame for service design labs to act as supportive physical, social and imaginary spaces. Additionally, the research conceptualises service design labs as temporal and situated meta-designs inside complex service systems.

Mara Trübenbach - PRESENCE, PRESENTATION & REPRESENTATION: BETWEEN MODEL MAKING AND MEDIATION OF MATERIAL IN ARCHITECTURAL PRACTICE DURING COVID-19

This paper presents a remote ethnographic study of the model maker Ellie Sampson of the London-based architectural office HaworthTompkins, carried out during the Covid-19 lockdown in Summer/Autumn 2020. The paper aims to show how Ellie’s activities, and the interactions they involve between her specialist skill and the general practice development of HaworthTompkins as a whole, form a privileged “site” within the office for the creation of material literacy in architecture design. The enforced condition of digital meeting imposed on an analogue, and live, working environment opened a window that allowed certain hidden processes in HaworthTompkins’ office to be recorded. These processes shed light on the way in which the office exchanges knowledge and experience about embodied material. This research was presented back to the office as a way to decentralize the “digital” within the digital, to create new insight through the condition of the pandemic.

Hugh Strange - Architecture at the Building Site: A consideration of Drawing, Construction and Labour in Challenging the separation of Project and Building

W.R.Lethaby significantly changed his attitude to the building site between his first and last built works, Avon Tyrell and All Saints’ church, built just a decade apart. For the first building, Lethaby chose to draw every aspect of the design. A shifting approach, articulated in a number of texts he produced in the intervening years, led him to greatly reduce his drawn works for the latter building, seeking here to establish the central role of the building site in the project evolution, and integrating labour more directly into the design process. Similarly, Walter Segal built a temporary structure within the garden space of his own house that established a number of principles, centred on the use of readily available, mass-produced and dimensionally coordinated materials. These off-the-shelf elements were employed with minimal on-site alteration, and fitted, with dry jointing, into a timber post and beam structure that was dimensioned according to standard insulation slabs and plywood sheets; the omission of wet trades, and the reduction in secondary alteration, transformed the nature of on-site work towards a process of assembly. These principles were later developed and refined in a number of private house commissions that were developed with a view towards rigorous simplification of process, and were undertaken with no main contractor; their pared-back logic requiring only a carpenter, an electrician and a plumber.  The potential of these ideas was finally utilised and fulfilled in a series of self-build houses on council owned land within the London Borough of Lewisham. Walter Segal’s work exemplified an architecture borne of ideas around and about construction and oriented towards the building site, while his approach, like that of Lethaby, suggests the potential of ideas of construction to radically reconfigure roles and relationships in the building process. The research examines, through a series of case studies, how the separation of Project and Building has been and might be challenged. It also questions how my practice might change, and my ways of working develop, to allow a closer relationship with making, merging design and construction, and fostering an increased sense of immediacy.

Matthew Dalziel - What I think about before I do anything important 

My poems (in the beginning) are like a table on which one place interesting things one has found on ones walks: a pebble, a rusty nail, a strangely shaped root, the corner of a torn photograph etc…where after months of looking at them and thinking about them daily, certain surprising relationships, which hint at meaning, begin to appear….

Charles Simic

For architects, creative and cultural practitioners, and for researchers, the ongoing assembly of reminders is a common practice. As we develop into our craft(s) we build libraries of personal references. These references are thought-tools, stories we use to make new stories. As we imagine our way into relationship with the challenges of our time, the cultivation of new thought-tools is a core practice. This PhDxP is titled Architectural Imagination after Human Exceptionalism. It uses the method of praxis (theory in practice) to graft together insights from Posthumanism and Environmental Humanities discourses with live architectural projects. In doing so it seeks to cultivate imaginative capacity as we transition into post-anthropocentric architectures.