Read the first issue of TAD online by logging in to ACSA and visiting tandfonline.com/utad.

From Technology | Architecture + Design
Issue 1:1, May 2017

Caryn Brause, Chris Ford, Clare Olsen, Jeana D’Agostino Ripple, Marci S. Uihlein & Andrzej Zarzycki

Discourse on technology and design is necessary and vital in our contemporary context of environmental crisis, lack of equity in resource allocation, and infrastructural failure. Researchers, policy makers, and practitioners are grappling with these difficulties in the context of political and economic uncertainty. Given the complexity and immediacy of the technological and cultural challenges that pervade our world, architecture and design disciplines are now at a pivotal moment to take action. Architects and built environment professionals have always been involved in fostering the shift from information to translation, from analytics to application. However, we’re now seeing spatial and design intelligence contribute to a rapidly growing culture of original research. New technologies—designed and developed through collaboration across disciplines, rigorous methodological testing, and projective experimentation—are vital to further stimulate the pace of research and its implementation. Significant growth requires prominent venues to advance and test progressive ideas, to elevate the visibility of architectural research, and to bridge the academy and professional practice.

To this end, the ACSA community is launching its first new scholarly journal in seventy years. The journal of Technology|Architecture + Design (TAD) is a new peer-reviewed international journal dedicated to the advancement of scholarship in the field of building technology, with a focus on the impact, translation, and integration of technology in architecture and design. TAD solicits, captures, and shares new knowledge in how we think about, make, and use technology within the building arts.1 TAD will be published semiannually. With a necessarily expansive audience in mind, TAD is designed in careful consideration of strategic scholarly formats to combine the fields of architecture, design, and technology. In this endeavor, TAD expands upon three distinctive aspects of architectural publication: (1) its role in knowledge forming in addition to dissemination, (2) the visual cognition and translation evident in architectural publication, and (3) author and audience diversity ranging across disciplines, between practice and academia, and through new forms of creative, scholarly engagements.

Knowledge Forming and Dissemination
Formats for influential scholarly publication tend to shift at pivotal moments of changing technology and disciplinary reevaluation. For example, the very notion of peer review developed over time, first as a means of elevating and publicizing the sciences and later as a way to hold scientists accountable for their claims, thereby justifying public funding during political change.2

Similarly, architects are increasingly partnering in multidisciplinary research teams, integrating design and science methodologies. Beyond providing a publication platform, TAD asks contributing authors to identify their methodologies and metrics of evaluation, and to assess their efficacy and design to deepen this collective work. These metrics, whatever form they may take, become tools in understanding what has been tested and how our collective knowledge has grown, allowing for accountability in research contributions, whether they are subtle or revolutionary, fully resolved or works in progress.

Visual Cognition and Translation
Emphasizing the role of visual cognition invites dialogue between design and technology so that designers may re-engage in the technical domains that have become external to the discipline, and researchers operating within scientific modalities can incorporate design characteristics into their approach. Appreciating the intrinsic importance of visual thinking in the design disciplines, TAD infuses visual thinking into discussions of research methodology, metrics, and projective design proposals. Articulating the value of research contributions through the language of design is essential to advance the discourse and increase the potential for practical translation.

Diverse Contributors, Diverse Audiences
Research in technology, architecture, and design engages diverse thinkers, and the format of this journal bridges the literature of the humanities and sciences by including both invited content around a particular subfield and calls for peer-reviewed manuscript submissions. The distinct article formats (double-blind peer-reviewed content and invited Op/Positions, Research Methodologies, and Reviews) provide varied perspectives on current research approaches, ideas, and assessments and highlight directions for future research. Open-themed issues will continue to showcase emergent design and technology dialogues and reveal the depth of our field. By cracking open formats, curatorial perspectives, and expectations for the length of manuscripts, we ensure diverse voices and increase scholarly opportunity.

TAD Futures
TAD calls upon contributing authors to advance and transform the current discourse on building-based technologies with the goal of expanding, reimagining, and challenging its role for architecture and design.3 TAD’s audience includes the ACSA’s 5,000 architecture faculty, over 300 supporting architectural firms, and diverse extradisciplinary organizations. We invite this strong, diverse community to exchange architectural and design technology research through this venue, triggering imperative innovation, identifying dialogues currently finding a home in disparate subfields, and enlarging the impact of design and technology research in the built environment.

Notes

 

  1. TAD, Technology|Architecture + Design, mission statement, 2016, www.tadjournal.org
  2. Alex Csiszar, “Peer Review: Troubled from the Start,” Nature 532, no. 7599 (April 19, 2016): 306–8.
  3. TAD, Technology|Architecture + Design, mission statement (note 1).

 

Read the first issue of TAD online by logging in to ACSA and visiting tandfonline.com/utad.