DATA::DISTRICT is one of ten thesis seminars and studios in the graduate architecture program at Taubman College of Architecture and Planning for the academic year 2020–21. 

This thesis year provides speculative counterpoint to the professional duties of the Master of Architecture program. Older and perhaps still deeper than the profession of architecture, the discipline of architecture maintains a cultural conversation. It asks why one thing is more worth working on than another. After all, design consists of propositions, not just analytically indicated solutions. A good design proposition seeks to reawaken the cultural imagination, not just to solve a specifiable problem. Here in this thesis program, our speculative propositions are eccentric, unique, critical, and most often socially fictional. They ask how else the world could be understood. Each of them seeks some small way to provoke shifts in some larger cultural thinking. 

For instance, what does it mean to live, work, and design amid informational superabundance? When just about everything is digitally mediated, digital in itself is no longer so interesting, unless mostly just frightening. As witnessed in this pandemic year, digital imposes itself on the world until it becomes the world. Quantification, productization, and the economics of attention eclipse almost any other latent cultural possibilities that they cannot engineer. 

Yet, increasingly, the unintended consequences of such relentless mediation tend to matter too. For as complexity theory asserts, “more is different.” Emergent effects, seams, glitches,  hacks, reappropriations, and contrarian propositions all take on cultural energy. 

There is little to be gained from protesting  “the system,” however. Instead it makes more sense to recognize life amid a “world of systems,” and to learn where to seek agency among those. It helps to recognize systems thinking as a creative genre, and also as a category of knowledge. Conversely it would be unwise just to await an invitation to design some isolated object. Today’s more statregic designers must interpret and communicate the larger system context from which new kinds of design opportunity and challenge arise. 

The projects of this thesis seminar and studio have begun right there. Seeking opportunity amid a world of systems, they have begun from an epistemological take on that genre, questioned the belief that any one big control structure exists, chosen particular resource flows in which to invervene, and looked for local glitches, differences, and reapppropriations to express. 

If any one shared a theme has emerged from this hyperlocal focus, that too seems epistemological. It is about the kinds of knowledge that reside in place. Communities of practice that take care of places can enact just the kind of latent cultural capital that the digital attention economy might otherwise eclipse. One easily misunderstood word for this is commons. That is often instantly dismissed as tragic. The idea of a commons need not be tragic, if understood more as a practice than as a place. But often the opposite to smartphone obsessions, commoning runs on alertness to surroundings. Resisting the attention economy begins by going for a walk, finding a more effortless fascination with the world, and cultivating kinds of attention different from those one is asked to “pay.” Knowledge of place needs little instruction. 

This seminar and studio begins from one such cultural proposition in local data: knowledge resides in place because not all that informs has been sent!  Some of it resides in immediate physical context. Form in-forms. Where you are might still affect what you know. There is more to local data than geographic positional coordinates. Some data not only describe a particular place, but also make sense only there, where they might be best disambiguated by what else is also there. After all, language itself, with its prepositions and metaphors, often uses spatial relationships for making sense. 

Why the discipline of architecture would have opinions and perhaps even obligations on any of this larger cultural condition should then seem obvious enough. There is a duty to uphold presence. As the current pandemic lockdowns and distancing have demonstrated, life without the physical benefits of context feels impoverished, and much more difficult. Stuck at a screen at home, try this thought experiment. Imagine your favorite city, and then try imagining it without its architecture. Or this one: take mental stock of the everyday habits and practices you are missing. In how many of them does the configuration of context make things easier, perhaps more enjoyable. 

Architects, interaction designers, and cognitive scientists understand the importance of embodiment. The ability to know, do, and enjoy without names, procedures, and apps depends on physical scale, orientation, and habit. As explained by the increasingly recognized principle of extended mind, physical context, props, and, so sadly lacking at the moment, interpersonal distances have agency in activity. Consciousness is a process, not a thing, and often not a computer-like knowledge representation. When people play situations, they do not need to say how.

This thesis seminar and studio investigates social fictions in local data via design interventions in situated technology. Toward a more appropriately and locally augmented architecture, it adopts five qualities to investigate. Ambient, Responsive, Tuned, Tangible, and Walkable. 

The projects to follow vary widely according to the ongoing interests of the participants. This thesis seminar and studio exists to focus and co-energize these respective efforts, and not to put everyone to work on an instructor’s own agenda. 

All this work is being developed amid the unfortunate conditions of the pandemic year. If that has only heightened the wish for meaningful places to go, to take part in meaningful upkeep of the world, please understand that.