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DATA::DISTRICT THESIS GROUP
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SEMINAR ABSTRACTS

 
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Data On the Edge: The newsstand is  a place for the people within neighborhoods to have a central location where information can be gathered and connections with other neighbors occur by chance. The newsstand becomes a water cooler situation for neighborhood residents, where gossip, current events, and information control the narrative and conversations that have resulted from these chance encounters. This idea of an information hub in the city will be the focus of this design. A place where localised data collection and physical connections of people happen. As more information is becoming more digital and subsequently more data is being produced, the data needs reliable storage methods. Storing this data on the edge, brings the data back to the people who generate it and provides the opportunity for a physical infrastructure. Focusing on the fabric of the neighborhood allows for the people to be involved, creating a sense of place and community for those within and around the neighborhood boundaries. The intervention of these localised data centers scattered around neighborhoods allows for these objects to act not only as a system of infrastructure but as a communal gathering place.
–Nicholas Button

Possible Connectivity: Today, we are increasingly disembodied by our digital condition. Algorithms herd us into flocks of self-similarity, isolate us in digital like-mindedness. Social media is a loudspeaker, allowing us to talk at but not with one another.
Entanglements generate necessary, unexpected combinations and collaborations. Humans need this complexity to thrive, to survive. The ability of humans to collaborate is directly affected by communication, trust and the sense of a commonly held future. Communication relies upon locality--its knowledge, geography, and infrastructures. It cannot transcend space. This thesis facilitates shared experience and entanglements through precisely located instruments of communication which ask users to speak and listen across streets, neighborhoods, boundaries 
–Christine Darragh

System Scale Memory: Cities can be understood as a network of systems. According to Dana Meadows, “a system is an interconnected set of elements that is coherently organized in a way that achieves something”. Important in this definition are the emphasis on three key concepts: elements, interconnections, and function/purpose.
As a method of organization, system has two primary means of navigation; scale and adaptability. Taken together, the performance of these mechanisms form the basis of the relative health of a system. Systems that can negotiate nimbly across scale and adapt to changing circumstances will prevail over those that do not, enhancing their resilience. Cities accomplish this through the use of districts.
A product of time is the development of feedback loops, which perform a similar role in systems that memory does in people. In cities, feedback loops are both a driver of how systems respond to future change - how they learn, but also manifest as the physical fabric of a place, forming a significant part of it’s identity.
Situated in Savannah, Georgia, this thesis seeks to analyze the relationship between scale and memory within systems in order to understand their effect on the health of districts, specifically as it relates to their role as functional frameworks of daily living, repositories of culture, and power brokers between scales within cities.
–Bates Hagood
Towards a Place: Natural resources and laws have an impact on the language of our physical setting and a direct relationship with human well-being. According to Stephen Kellert, humans are biologically programmed to feel self-sufficient in close contact with nature and thus they incorporate nature's imagery to build their surroundings. This thesis tries to understand the influence of Biophilia in the learning environment, especially in an early childhood education as a sensitive phase of human development. Revealing tangible materials in the geographic organization of urban life explicitly both in physical and visual settings supports childhood activity, memory, and imagination. A strong presence of natural dynamics in learning spaces plays a vital role to develop the sensory pattern and school as a hyperlocal institution has a larger impact on the community's cultural fabric. The modes of learning are getting virtual every day toward delocalization despite our localized existence. This thesis proposes the explicit emergence of Biophilia in the childhood learning space with an active engagement with the hyperlocal domain to support a happy learning and healthy community.
–Mukshatu Khanam

Urban (Re)Wilding: This proposal engages the re-wilding of cities that has become apparent during the pandemic. It aims to make larger ecological networks more knowable and places emphasis on animal agency in urban life. By shifting perceptions of returning wildlife as threats to the city, this proposal introduces inter-species wilding zones that make existing urban environments more vibrant as wildlife engage with these sites at street level. Wilding zones with occupy sites in Washington D.C., a city experiencing re-wilding in an architectural context that is inhospitable for wildlife. Washington D.C. has the highest percentage of parkland of any dense city in the United States, but this abundance of green space is primarily designed for human use and ignores the needs of other agents in the system. Architectural fittings will facilitate urban re-wilding and the growth of hybrid assemblages of humans and nonhumans in the District. This proposal’s re-wilding method is more so in the spirit of public bio-art rather than conventional biodiversity stewardship. Re-wilding the District through vibrancy and embodied experience appears as animal data-driven installations that emphasize hyperlocal ecological systems and their agents in a way that is less didactic than most environmental education.
–Carley Leckie

Probing Agriculture: Urban agriculture and food production are contentious topics due to the failures of capitalism and modernism in addressing social capital related to communal sustainability, equality of resource allocation and food security. In the book ‘Freedom Farmers’, Monica White, an educator and advocator of environmental justice, connects the relationship between land and food to notions of freedom, viewing agriculture as “an instrument liberty and freedom”. The thesis views radical resistance as opportunities for systems intervention, by ‘hacking’ the system and transcending our design paradigms to offer alternatives that build towards longevity and sustainability of urban farming communities.

Identifying the gaps of urban agriculture developments through systems thinking, the thesis will focus on creating a system through components design, drawing out relationships through urbanism and cartographic site studies, as well as its hybridization opportunities in interfacing with urban communities in Michigan. Last but not the least, it will propose a series of urban agriculture interventions that promote community resilience and circular economies through capacity building. The proposal aims to harness the power of multidisciplinary design in curating and inspiring holistic and convivial scenographic opportunities through civic hybridization, cultural hegemony, technological innovation, knowledge aggregation and collective commoning.
–Jamie Lee

Freedom (from) Trade Zones: is working title for a thesis that speculates on the pitfalls and glitches originating from Foreign Trade Zones and International Trade Districts. Focused on reclaiming agency via hacking of existing systems of power and finance, the inquiry aims to define trajectories and explore alternative trade tactics that may equate to fewer “placeless” locales where polyglot urbanism and monoculture lives are embraced to the detriment to local economies and communities. Culminating in varied architectural outposts situated in the international shipping, trading, and financial powerhouse of Metro Toronto the pursuit aims to borrow from present and past typologies as well as burgeoning technologies to find radical new clarity and resilience within flows of traveling goods, information, and people.
–Brian Pekar

NEOS: Are we free to choose what we put our energy into? Are we aware if and when our energy is being manipulated? How do we flex power over unseen energy harvesters? These queries serve as a guide and an inspiration as we try to pursue our modern faith in our choreographed lives.
The task at hand concerns awareness of our individual focal perception. Today our focus is under siege by algorithmic forces that aim to control us through constant distraction. Wherever our attention is directed points the needle of our navigational compass. Our ability to selectively concentrate on tasks defines how we progress. The complexity of our world cannot be comprehended in whole but only in reductions. Methods for harvesting our attention are elusive and woven into our cultural fabric. It is now commonly known that profit driven tactics used by the data information economy are engineered to be addictive. We must uphold the right to choose what we attend to. This thesis seeks to design counter-acting apparatuses to address these unchecked forces. Architecture can influence behavior in space, but only if the individual resists comfortable collective pressures and looks up. These interventions seek to exploit pressure points of emotionally addictive design using participation, demonstration, and belief systems. As these data forces steer the direction of culture and etiquette, a reciprocal force must be applied for balance. These balancing forces mean not to extinguish integrated smartphone apps, but to raise opportunities towards the direction of presence, where there is still much to be discovered. –Waylon Richmond


The New Boricua Energy Authority: The new Boricua of a hurricane-disrupted Puerto Rico seeks community in energy democracy. Amid conditions of radical decentralization, the design of a  Resilience Zone invites architectural intervention. As cleaner local energy becomes more practical, it raises competing utopias. This thesis explores ways in which architectural expression, hyper-local guidance, and decentralized energy systems can help counter neo-colonial development models that have led the recent wave of privatization, into an elite autonomous “Puertopia”. By introducing participatory design approach and vacant space reclamation, districts will explore the possibility of transforming into a Resilience Zone composed of hubs that promote and teach residents of the community how to prosper by using renewable-decentralized energy. The architecture of a Resilience Zone represents not only cleaner energy but also a  new dimension of civic education. In evoking what was a formerly invisible resource, The New Boricua Energy  Authority finds a new genre for design. The architectural proposal serves as an archetype that would adapt to zones throughout the island where communities could benefit from a built and social network in the spirit of resilience.
–Karina Tirado

The Hackable Box: To spark life in small businesses and organizations in a post-pandemic reboot, this thesis proposes a local start-up incubator workspace and unofficial community resources in an abandoned retail space. Reappropriating big box stores requires a new form of anchor organization beyond the prototypical methods of retail planning. This is especially important in underserved exurban areas that lack sufficient civic amenities. To create an inviting public system that citizens might identify with it, this project creates a systematized component architecture that establishes spatial allocations and adjacencies to develop small businesses and publically occupy the interstitial spaces. For this, the notion of a “hackathon” is implimented: decentralized networks of collaborative place-making.
–Michael Werkmeister



Pysche Harbor: Up in the sky, a mirrored world (Data world) is growing. Formless, boundariless, timeless, emotionless. ... With the help of the internet, UI, and behavioral economics, we burned out lives in vain to philistine, easy spread, free intellectual products. After COVID-19, suddenly, we found that we're sailing separately in our small boats(houses, apartments), communicating through the air, lacking a harbor for us to get together. We need a place to temporarily get away from the internet and have a short break together with our neighbors, and talk with each other. We need a new type of place. We live in a world full of systems, interacting with each other. We can get some hints from other systems either in history or contemporary when we need a solution. Le Corbusier responds to his time, calling for hygiene houses, he fought the main tread of over-decorated Beaux-Arts Schoology by returning to the original concept of architecture and learning from other well-adapted disciplines, industrial and engineering worlds. Learned from him, we can look at the concept and evolution of common space, and look at some cases in 4D hyperlocal. Finally, I will propose a prototype for this new place, I call it the "psyche harbor".
–Kun Zhang