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Abstract
Architecture today is most often produced and represented in virtual interfaces: proprietary apps, CAD/BIM programs, image editors, and scripting environments. But these instruments, designed for designing, often make certain assumptions about who architecture’s subjects are. For whom, for instance, is BIM made? What makes an ideal user? In representations such as scale figures, users, and avatars, software applications imagine subjects through their orchestration of behaviors and configuration of identities. Setting aside space-, form-, and object-making, this essay unpacks various means through which othering practices occur in virtual design environments and the values represented in the contexts of architectural software.
Notes
Notes
1 Ibrahim Carmona (@ibracarmona), Twitter, October 7, 2019, 2:40 p.m., https://twitter.com/ibracarmona/status/1181278188514603010. “Adobe acaba de enviar este correo a todos los usuarios en Venezuela. Esto representa un problema sobre todo para las agencias de publicidad y empresas que requieren los paquetes profesionales para poder trabajar.” Translation: “Adobe has just sent this email to all users in Venezuela. This represents a problem especially for all publishing agencies and companies that rely on their professional software packages.”
2 Exec. Order No. 13,884, 84 Fed. Reg. 38843 (Aug. 7, 2019), https://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/sanctions/Programs/Documents/13884.pdf.
3 Matt Novak, “Adobe Will Cancel All Subscriptions in Venezuela to Comply With U.S. Sanctions,” Gizmodo, October 8, 2019, https://gizmodo.com/adobe-will-cancel-all-subscriptions-in-venezuela-to-com-1838867205.
4 Lev Manovich, Software Takes Command (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013).
5 Galo Canizares, Digital Fabrications: Designer Stories for a Software-Based Planet (San Francisco: Applied Research & Design, 2019).
6 Manovich, Software Takes Command, 124.
7 See John May, Signal. Image. Architecture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019); and Amelyn Ng, “OOTB,” e-flux Architecture, August 29, 2019, https://www.e-flux.com/architecture/positions/280207/ootb/.
8 A general overview of this discourse can be seen in Zeynep Çelik Alexander’s introduction to Design Technics: Archaeologies of Architectural Practice, ed. Zeynep Çelik Alexander and John May (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019), ix.
9 Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman have written extensively about heuristics and implicit bias: “Judgement Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases,” Science (New Series) 185, no. 4157 (September 27, 1974): 1124–31.
10 Arindam Dutta, “Linguistics, Not Grammatology: Architecture’s A Prioris and Architecture’s Priorities,” in A Second Modernism: MIT, Architecture, and the ‘Techno-Social’ Moment, ed. Arindam Dutta (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013), 5.
11 Peter Guthrie, known for his collaborations with architects, sells panoramic sky images for CGI artists. “360° Panoramic HDR Skies,” PG SKIES, accessed April 20, 2020, https://www.pg-skies.net/.
12 Simone C. Niquille, “What Does the Graphical User Interface Want?,” in Work, Body, Leisure, ed. Marina Otero Verzier and Nick Axel (Berlin: Hatje Catnz, 2018), 211–30.
13 Aaron Tobey, “Architect as User: Software and the Value of Work,” Journal of Architectural Education 73, no. 2 (October 2019): 146–55.
14 N. Katherine Hayles, My Mother Was a Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 35.
15 Hayles referred to this perception of simulation as the “regime of computation”—the notion that the physical world can be digitized in some way—and Manovich called it softwarization. Hayles, 196. Manovich, Software Takes Command, 5
16 Dora Epstein Jones, “Little People Everywhere: The Populated Plan,” Log 45 (Winter/Spring 2019): 67.
17 Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 9.
18 Anne Balsamo, Technologies of the Gendered Body: Reading Cyborg Women (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), 3.
19 Teodor Javanaud Emdén, “Skalgubbar by Teodor Javanaud Emdén,” Skalgubbar, accessed January 20, 2020, https://skalgubbar.se/.
20 Emdén, “Skalgubbar.”
21 Jones, “Little People Everywhere,” 67.
22 Teodor Javanaud Emdén, “Read Me,” Skalgubbar, accessed January 28, 2020, https://skalgubbar.se/read-me/.
23 A-Frame, “About,” NONSCANDINAVIA, accessed January 28, 2020, http://www.nonscandinavia.com/about.
24 Hilary Sample and Michael Meredith, A Situation Constructed from Loose and Overlapping Social and Architectural Aggregates (Baunach: Spurbuchverlag, 2016).
25 Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, “Race and/as Technology; or, How to Do Things to Race,” Camera Obscura 70 (May 2009): 7–35, https://doi.org/10.1215/02705346-2008-013.
26 Chun, 8.
27 Michele White, “The Hand Blocks the Screen: A Consideration of the Ways the Interface Is Raced,” HASTAC, last modified August 18, 2009, https://www.hastac.org/electronic-techtonics/michele-white-hand-blocks-screen-consideration-ways-interface-raced.
28 Ng, “OOTB.”
29 Stephanie Syjuco, “Default Men and 3-D Diversity: Bryce vs. Sang,” Open Space (SFMOMA), December 12, 2009, https://openspace.sfmoma.org/2009/12/default-men-and-3-d-diversity-bryce-vs-sang/.
30 SketchUp Team, “Aint Our First Rodeo,” SketchUp Blog (blog), accessed December 20, 2019, https://blog.sketchup.com/sketchupdate/aint-our-first-rodeo.
31 Syjuco, “Default Men.”
32 Simone C. Niquille, “SimFactory,” e-flux Architecture, September 22, 2017, https://www.e-flux.com/architecture/artificial-labor/153913/simfactory/.
33 “ANSUR II,” Pennsylvania State University, accessed December 20, 2019, https://www.openlab.psu.edu/ansur2/.
34 “ANSUR II.”
35 Niquille, “SimFactory.”
36 Norman I. Badler, Cary B. Phillips, Bonnie Lynn Webber, Simulating Humans: Computer Graphics Animation and Control (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).
37 Badler, Phillips, and Webber, 15.
38 Badler, Phillips, and Webber, 40.
39 Meredith Broussard, Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2018), 67.
40 Ng, “OOTB.”
41 Ng, “OOTB.”
42 Nelly Oudshoorn and Trevor Pinch, “Introduction: How Users and Non-Users Matter,” in How Users Matter: The Co-Construction of Users and Technology, ed. Nelly Oudshoorn and Trevor Pinch (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003).
43 Oudshoorn and Pinch, 8.
44 Tobey, “Architect as User,” 148.
45 Curtis Roth, “Software Epigenetics and Architectures of Life,” e-flux Architecture, February 16, 2019, https://www.e-flux.com/architecture//248079/software-epigenetics-and-architectures-of-life/.
46 Olia Lialina and Dragan Espenschied, “Do You Believe in Users?,” in Mass Effect: Art and the Internet in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015), 1–14.
47 Lialina and Espenschied, 3.
48 See, e.g., “The GNU Manifesto,” which describes the mission of a free operating system developed by the Free Software Foundation. “The GNU Manifesto,” GNU, accessed April 10, 2020, https://www.gnu.org/gnu/manifesto.en.html.
49 Reinhold Martin, “Is Digital Culture Secular? On Books by Mario Carpo and Antoine Picon,” Harvard Design Magazine, no. 35 (2012): 60–65.
50 Lucia Allais, “Rendering,” in Alexander and May, Design Technics, 32.
51 Tversky and Kahneman, “Judgement Under Uncertainty,” 1124.
52 Randy Deutsch, Superusers: Design Technology Specialists and the Future of Practice (New York: Routledge, 2019).
53 Lialina and Espenschied, “Do You Believe in Users?,” 9.
54 Deutsch, Superusers, 3.
55 Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), 149–81.
56 Balsamo, Technologies of the Gendered Body, 5.
57 Manovich frequently referred to creative software as a meta-medium to suggest its potential to contain other media. See Manovich, Software Takes Command.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Galo Canizares
Galo Canizares is a designer, writer, and educator at Ohio State University’s Knowlton School of Architecture. His work blends absurdity, genre fiction, world-making, simulation, and parafiction to address issues in technology and the built environment. He is the author of Digital Fabrications: Designer Stories for a Software-Based Planet (Applied Research + Design, 2019), a collection of essays on software and design.