Design Modelling Symposium 2013

As in previous years, the Symposium consists of two parts, two days of Workshops and Master Classes followed by a three-day Conference with Keynote Lectures, Case Studies and Poster Sessions.

The Design Modelling Symposium Berlin 2013 would like to challenge the participants to reflect on the possibility of computational systems that bridge design phase and occupancy of buildings. This rethinking of the designed artifact beyond its physical has had profound effects on other industries already. How does it affect architecture and engineering?

With our Call for Papers we have called for projects in architecture, design and engineering that address the domain specific challenges in these fields. Connectivity is another important factor which has strong implications especially for urban design and questions of infrastructure design and use. In some cases ubiquitous information may lead to the disappearance of long established building typologies and in other cases large hidden infrastructure is being created to enable such computational networked systems.

At the scale of engineering and building systems new perspectives may open up by engaging built form as a continuous prototype, which can track and respond during use and serve as a real world implementation of its design model. This has been tried many times from intelligent façades to smart homes and networked grids but much of it was only technology driven and not approached from a more holistic design perspective.

Furthermore as a critical level of connectivity is reached previously isolated computational systems may now benefit from access to data from a vast range of sources. But how does design respond? What are changes or new approaches previously impossible? How do we update the false promise of a technological future that’s reliant on replacing everything old with the new with an integrated approach that works with existing infrastructure and the build environment through intelligent interventions? Embedded computational systems can have an impact on both the design process as well as play a role in the built environment. It is this connection we would like to discuss in more depth during the Design Modelling Symposium Berlin.