Tomasz Jaskiewicz is an Assistant Professor of Explorative Prototyping and Interactive Environments at the Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering, Delft University of Technology. In his work he develops and evaluates tools, methods and strategies supporting iterative design processes, and applies them to empower people in the context of smart buildings and smart cities. He actively bridges academic research and design education, having initiated and coordinated the Interactive Environments Minor program at TU Delft, directing the Living Office Delft Design Lab and coordinating the Interactive Technology Design course at his faculty. During his career he also co-founded a startup Hive Systems developing software for designing and programming distributed networks of interactive agents.
Role: Partners
Mette Ramsgaard Thomsen
Mette Ramsgaard Thomsen’s research centers on the intersection between architecture and computer science. Her focus is on the profound changes that digital technologies instigate in the way architecture is thought, designed and built. In 2004 Ramsgaard Thomsen completed an interdisciplinary PhD in architecture and computer science. In 2005 Ramsgaard Thomsen founded the Centre for IT and Architecture research group (CITA) at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, School of Architecture, Design and Conservation. In 2010 Ramsgaard Thomsen became full Professor in Architecture and Digital Technologies.
At CITA, Ramsgaard Thomsen has piloted a special research focus on the new digital-material relations that digital technologies bring forth. Investigating advanced computer modelling, digital fabrication and material specification CITA has been central in the forming of an international research field examining the changes to material practice in architecture. This has been led by a series of research investigations developing concepts and technologies as well as strategic projects such as the international Innochain research network (EU MSCA ITN) that fosters interdisciplinary sharing and dissemination of expertise and supports new collaborations in the fields of architecture, engineering and design and Complex Modelling examining the infrastructures of the information model.
Henriette Bier
After graduating in architecture (1998) from the University of Karlsruhe in Germany, Henriette Bier worked with Morphosis (1999-2001) on internationally relevant projects in the US and Europe. She has taught digitally-driven architectural design (2002-2003) at universities in Austria, Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands and since 2004 she mainly teaches and researches at Technical University Delft (TUD) with a focus on Robotic Building. Bier initiated and coordinated (2005-06) a workshop and lecture series on Digital Design and Fabrication with invited guests from MIT and ETHZ, and finalized (2008) her PhD on System-embedded Intelligence in Architecture. She coordinated EU projects E-Archidoct and F2F Continuum (2007-10) and led 4TU projects RDCB and Adaptive Joints (2015-18). From 2017 to 2019, Henriette Bier served as a professor at the Dessau Institute of Architecture. Results of her research are internationally published in books, journals and conference proceedings and she regularly lectures and leads workshops internationally.
Paul Pangaro
Paul Pangaro has been studying conversation and design, both human-human and human-machine, for over thirty years. His design practice, lectures, and writing have centered on designing for conversation and seeing design as conversation. His career spans roles as interaction designer, entrepreneur, researcher, performer, and professor. Currently Pangaro is creating #NewMacyMeetings, a renewal of the original Macy Meetings from 1940s and 50s that became the foundation of cybernetics, now with 21st-century trans-global and trans-generational constituents. In 2018 Pangaro, with TJ McLeish, created a full-scale replica of Pask’s Colloquy of Mobiles, displayed at Centre Pompidou in Paris in 2020 and now part of the permanent collection of ZKM museum in Karlsruhe, Germany. In January 2019 Pangaro became Professor of the Practice in the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. His academic career includes a BS in Humanities/Computer Science from MIT (after which he joined the research staff at the Architecture Machine Group) and a PhD with Gordon Pask in Conversation Theory in the Cybernetics Department at Brunel University (UK). He collaborated with Pask for over a decade. Pangaro recently formed the non-profit Cybernetic Media to help preserve and extend the rich legacy of cybernetics.
Navid Navab
Navid Navab (CA/IR) is a media alchemist, interdisciplinary composer, and tabletop cosmologist. Interested in the poetics of schizophonia, gesture, and embodiment, his work investigates the transmutation of matter and the enrichment of its performative qualities. Navid uses gestures, rhythms and events from everyday life as a basis for real time compositions, resulting in augmented acoustical poetry and painterly light that enchant improvisational and pedestrian movements.
Navab has led large scale interdisciplinary research projects at IRCAM Paris, CRIMMT McGill Montreal, Computer Aided Medical Procedures Group TUM Munich, Milieux and Hexagram networks at Concordia Montreal, and CIID Copenhagen. Navid currently co-directs the Topological Media Lab, where he leverages phenomenological studies to inform the creation of computationally-enchanted environments. TML projects serve as investigations in the construction of fresh modes of cultural knowledge and the critical studies of media arts and techno-science, bringing together practices of speculative inquiry, scientific investigation and artistic research-creation practices.
His works, which which take on the form of responsive architecture, site specific interventions, interactive scenographies, kinetic sculptures, and multimodal performances, have been presented at diverse venues such as: Ars Electronica, Contemporary Arts Museum of Zagreb, Nemo Biennale Paris, Japan Society NY, Kapelica Gallery Slovenia, Canadian Center for Architecture, HKW Berlin, Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, Digital Arts Biennial Montreal, Musiikin Aika Finland, SONICA Scotland, Eufonic Spain, and milanOltre Festival Italy.
Research-creation statement:
I maintain the view that computation is foremost a material process, non-linear, largely indeterminate, vibrant with life, and irreducible to deterministic models. Coming from this stance, my artistic process aims to preserve the richness of uncanny material-computational processes while leveraging them compositionally. The act of composing computational media could entail the orchestration of event dynamics to quasi-deterministically enact degrees of instability and to enchant the stuff-of-the-medium. This process starts with of an ethico-aesthetical search for the excitable mysteries of matter (material-energy-affective processes), and leads to a careful orchestration of sensuous moments of knowing with others, humans or none.
Svenja Keune
After exploring electronics to create adaptive and responsive textile surfaces and communicative objects, Svenja Keune turned toward seeds as a potential biological alternative, and as a dynamic material for textile design. During her PhD project “On Textile Farming” within the MSCA ArcInTexETN, and in order to explore alternative ways of living that the textile plant hybrids propose, she built and moved into a Tiny House on Wheels to live together with the research experiments. Her current interests include post-anthropocentric perspectives to textile and spatial design, additive manufacturing, multi-species relationships, design ethics, permaculture design processes, plant cultivation and biology.
Svenja Keune is a postdoctoral researcher at the Swedish School of Textiles, University of Borås, in Sweden and at the Centre for Information Technology and Architecture (CITA) at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts Schools of Architecture, Design and Conservation in Copenhagen, where she is currently working on ‘Designing and Living with Organisms (DLO)’, a 3 year project funded by an international postdoc grant from the Swedish Research Council.
Alice Jarry
Alice Jarry is a professor in the department of Design and Computation Arts at Concordia University. She is the director of Milieux Institute’s Speculative Life Biolab, co-director of the Topological media Lab, and a member of the Canada Excellence Research Chair in Next Generation Cities. As an artist-researcher and educator, Jarry specializes in site-specific responsive works, sci-art practices, socio-environmental design, digital arts, and tangible media. Her research brings concerns about sustainability, aesthetics, and politics to bear critically upon materiality, material production, and contemporary matters-of-concern regarding urban infrastructure. Her current projects focus on residual matter and smart and biomaterials for the built environment. With matter inseparable from both form and practice, her installation works explore how the development of reactive and filtering membranes – engaged in processes of transformation with site, technology, and communities – can provoke the emergence of adaptive forms and resilient socio-environmental relations.
Jarry is equally a member of Kheops – International Research Consortium on the Governance and Management of Large Infrastructure Projects -; Hexagram – International Network Dedicated to Research-Creation in Media Arts, Design, Technology and Digital Culture; and Montreal based Digital Arts Collective Perte-de-Signal (Montréal). Her research received funding from SSHRC, FRQSC, and Hexagram. Her works have been presented at Centre George Pompidou (Paris), Vox Centre de l’image Contemporaine (Montréal), Biennale Nemo (Paris), Leonardo Da Vinci Museum of Science and Technology (Milan), at Automata (International Digital Arts Biennial, Montreal), Le mois Multi (Quebec), Device_Art Triennale (Zagreb), Invisible Dog Art Center (New York), Mons 2015, European Capital of Culture (Mons), Physicalité (International Digital Arts Biennial, Montreal), La gare numérique (Jeumont), the LASER series (Leonardo) and in several locations across Canada, the United States, and Europe.
Manuel Kretzer
Dr. sc. Manuel Kretzer is professor for Material and Technology at the Dessau Department of Design, Anhalt University of Applied Sciences. His research aims at the creation of dynamic and adaptive objects, spaces and experiences. A specific focus is on new smart and biological material performance and their combination with advanced digital design and fabrication methods. In 2012, Manuel initiated materiability, a free educational platform that connects architects, designers and artists and provides access to novel material developments and technologies. In 2020 he founded the Materiability Research Group and associated Mat-Lab at the University Campus Dessau. Manuel Kretzer is also a founding partner at responsive design studio based in Cologne. The office works in various scales, including architecture, interior architecture, landscape architecture, furniture and object design, and provides individual digital design and fabrication services. Manuel has held teaching positions at ETH Zürich, the Braunschweig University of Art, the Technical University Braunschweig, the Dessau Institute of Architecture (DIA), the Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia (IAAC), the Faculty of Architecture Innsbruck University and the School of Architecture, Technical University Dublin.
Antonio Camurri
Antonio Camurri coordinates the EnTimeMent EU project with the LASG. He holds a PhD in Computer Engineering and is a professor at the University of Genoa, teaching Human Computer Interaction courses for the MS in Computer Engineering and MS in Digital Humanities. As art influences science and technology, science and technology can in turn inspire art — recognizing this mutually beneficial relationship, Camurri’s research interests combine scientific research in human-computer interaction with artistic and humanistic research, and includes non-verbal multimodal interactive systems; computational models of non-verbal full-body expressive gesture, emotion, and social signals; interactive multimodal systems for performing arts, for active experience of cultural content, for health, therapy and rehabilitation. Antonio Camurri is the Scientific director of Casa Paganini – InfoMus Research Centre of DIBRIS, former member of the Executive Committee of the IEEE CS Tech. Committee on Computer Generated Music, member of the editorial board of the Journal of New Music Research, and member of the ESF College of Expert Reviewers. He is coordinator of European funded projects in FP5 (IST MEGA), FP7 (ICT SAME, ICT FET SIEMPRE) and Horizon 2020 (DANCE; FET PROACTIVE EnTimeMent), Principal Investigator in over 20 EU-funded projects, and Co-director of ARIEL – Augmented Rehabilitation Joint Lab with the Giannina Gaslini Children Hospital. Camurri has authored over 150 scientific publications and co-owns several patents.
Michael O’Rourke
Michael O’Rourke is Professor of Philosophy and faculty in AgBioResearch and Environmental Science & Policy at Michigan State University. He is Director of the MSU Center for Interdisciplinarity and Director of the Toolbox Dialogue Initiative, an NSF-sponsored research initiative that investigates philosophical approaches to facilitating interdisciplinary research and implements them across a broad range of contexts. His research interests include epistemology, the philosophy of environmental science, communication and epistemic integration in collaborative, cross-disciplinary research, and linguistic communication between intelligent agents. He has published extensively on the topics of communication, interdisciplinary theory and practice, and robotic agent design. He has been a co-principal investigator or collaborator on funded projects involving environmental science education, facilitating cross-disciplinary communication, biodiversity conservation, sustainable agriculture, resilience in environmental systems, and autonomous underwater vehicles. He co-founded and served as co-director of the Inland Northwest Philosophy Conference, an interdisciplinary conference on philosophical themes, and as co-editor of the Topics in Contemporary Philosophy series published by MIT Press.