An Archaeology of Digital Design

The seminar explores the impact of the digital paradigm of the 1970s on architecture and the built environment. Students will gain a comprehensive understanding of how contemporary questions around the digital relate to their recent past. Through archival research, oral history interviews, software analysis, and image historiography, students will investigate the innovative history of digital design, from the late 1950s to today's AI Labs.

The main assignment will be to design an exhibition about the digital, based on a time-line research, and oral history interviews. Students will be challenged to develop an original hypothesis that allows for a new storytelling of the digital in architecture that goes beyond parametric design and takes cultural, economic, and social changes into account.

The research seminar promotes both collective group work and independent thinking, and encourages students to address two major challenges. In the first part of the semester, students will perform archival and library research in the collection of the Het Nieuwe Institute to understand how the digital entered architectural education, research and practice. This will include exploring institutional histories, curricula, research projects, and new computing machines. In the second part of the semester, students will develop a conceptual timeline of the digital, reflecting the findings of the research phase. The research will be shared with the public, by developing and curating an exhibition at BK.

Students are assessed through Design examination and Oral examination, in a form of weekly pin-ups showing research progress, arguments and concepts, organised in specific formats, as well as on the basis of the final deliverables. The criteria for assessment will be communicated in the course Reader (syllabus). The midterm assessment will take place halfway through the course program (not graded), and the final assessment will be done at the end of the course program (graded). Final presentation consists of a collective research group booklet in A4 (each student with four pages), one individual narrative with a contribution to the exhibition (one object per student) and the timeline (one A0 per student).

The student has achieved a sufficient result on scale 1 to 10 with 6, has the possibility to take a repair with a mark of 5 or 5,5 and failed with 4,9 or minor. Repair has to be completed within 2 weeks after completion of the course.