Associate Professor Daniel Cardoso Llach lectured at the Fall 2019 Science, Technology, and Society Speaker Series at the University of Michigan’s STS Department, co-hosted by the Department of Architecture, on 4 November 2019. In the talk, Prof. Cardoso Llach discussed ways to put socio-technical perspectives at the center of computational design research and learning.
Working things out: Design-STS Transitions — from Technical Formalization to Critical Imagination
The talk explores the notion that the fields of design and science and technology studies (STS) offer distinct but mutually enriching traditions of research and practice, and that at their convergence we may discover opportunities for critical and creative engagements with the built environment. Drawing from media archaeological, data-ethnographic, historiographic, and pedagogical explorations developed at CMU’s Computational Design laboratory, the talk discusses ways to embrace critically questions of design. What might we gain by, on the one hand, creating the conditions for technologies to be formulated inquisitively to interrogate or renegotiate sociotechnical relations? What might we gain by cultivating an interpretive attitude that construes digital environments and human-machine entanglements in design as new and exciting sites of sociotechnical inquiry?