Digital materiality: creativity and collaboration in digital design at 3XN Architects and GXN Innovation
<p>This DPhil thesis is about digital design at the Copenhagen based architecture studio 3XN Architects and GXN Innovation. In it, I examine how digital tools saturate design practices at the studio to develop a framework for analysing how design software and studio institutions come to shape...
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| Format: | Thesis |
| Language: | English |
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2020
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| _version_ | 1797069210987266048 |
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| author | Poulsgaard, KS |
| author2 | Rayner, S |
| author_facet | Rayner, S Poulsgaard, KS |
| author_sort | Poulsgaard, KS |
| collection | OXFORD |
| description | <p>This DPhil thesis is about digital design at the Copenhagen based architecture studio 3XN Architects and GXN Innovation. In it, I examine how digital tools saturate design practices at the studio to develop a framework for analysing how design software and studio institutions come to shape architects’ creative and collaborative work. The concept of digital materiality analyses the way successive layers of mathematics, code, and software come to mediate and shape creativity and collaboration for architects. I explore this through 15 months of ethnographic fieldwork at the studio where I interned and worked from 2017-2019. Taking the starting point that architects think with and through their social and technical environments, I argue that the organisation of these environments profoundly impact their creative capacity. The ethnographic side of this argument follows several design and research projects in the studio to analyse how social organisation and technics combine to enable creative and social extension of mind in design teams. I find that computational tools allow for intuitive creation of advanced 3D geometries. They integrate the mathematics and numerical calculations that underlie these into digital models that expand from being technical tools to also becoming vital design platforms at 3XN Architects and GXN Innovation. There is a certain flexibility to digital models and workflows in the studio. This flexibility is created from the combination of several software into one connected platform that can integrate the many moving parts of architectural practice and projects. This technical flexibility finds its parallel in the social organisation of the studio where different institutionalised practices allow architects to think about the same project in diverse ways, shifting between them by shifting relationships in their digital models. The wider theoretical contribution of the thesis examines productive overlaps between anthropological theory and enactive philosophy of mind by asking how these overlaps can help us study creativity as fundamentally enacted within shifting technical and social environments.</p> |
| first_indexed | 2024-03-06T22:21:06Z |
| format | Thesis |
| id | oxford-uuid:5516b5c5-86c6-47f4-93d9-cb5cc31d704d |
| institution | University of Oxford |
| language | English |
| last_indexed | 2024-03-06T22:21:06Z |
| publishDate | 2020 |
| record_format | dspace |
| spelling | oxford-uuid:5516b5c5-86c6-47f4-93d9-cb5cc31d704d2022-03-26T16:41:49ZDigital materiality: creativity and collaboration in digital design at 3XN Architects and GXN InnovationThesishttp://purl.org/coar/resource_type/c_db06uuid:5516b5c5-86c6-47f4-93d9-cb5cc31d704dCognitionPhilosophy of mindAnthropologyArchitectureSoftwareDesignEnglishHyrax Deposit2020Poulsgaard, KSRayner, SMalafouris, L<p>This DPhil thesis is about digital design at the Copenhagen based architecture studio 3XN Architects and GXN Innovation. In it, I examine how digital tools saturate design practices at the studio to develop a framework for analysing how design software and studio institutions come to shape architects’ creative and collaborative work. The concept of digital materiality analyses the way successive layers of mathematics, code, and software come to mediate and shape creativity and collaboration for architects. I explore this through 15 months of ethnographic fieldwork at the studio where I interned and worked from 2017-2019. Taking the starting point that architects think with and through their social and technical environments, I argue that the organisation of these environments profoundly impact their creative capacity. The ethnographic side of this argument follows several design and research projects in the studio to analyse how social organisation and technics combine to enable creative and social extension of mind in design teams. I find that computational tools allow for intuitive creation of advanced 3D geometries. They integrate the mathematics and numerical calculations that underlie these into digital models that expand from being technical tools to also becoming vital design platforms at 3XN Architects and GXN Innovation. There is a certain flexibility to digital models and workflows in the studio. This flexibility is created from the combination of several software into one connected platform that can integrate the many moving parts of architectural practice and projects. This technical flexibility finds its parallel in the social organisation of the studio where different institutionalised practices allow architects to think about the same project in diverse ways, shifting between them by shifting relationships in their digital models. The wider theoretical contribution of the thesis examines productive overlaps between anthropological theory and enactive philosophy of mind by asking how these overlaps can help us study creativity as fundamentally enacted within shifting technical and social environments.</p> |
| spellingShingle | Cognition Philosophy of mind Anthropology Architecture Software Design Poulsgaard, KS Digital materiality: creativity and collaboration in digital design at 3XN Architects and GXN Innovation |
| title | Digital materiality: creativity and collaboration in digital design at 3XN Architects and GXN Innovation |
| title_full | Digital materiality: creativity and collaboration in digital design at 3XN Architects and GXN Innovation |
| title_fullStr | Digital materiality: creativity and collaboration in digital design at 3XN Architects and GXN Innovation |
| title_full_unstemmed | Digital materiality: creativity and collaboration in digital design at 3XN Architects and GXN Innovation |
| title_short | Digital materiality: creativity and collaboration in digital design at 3XN Architects and GXN Innovation |
| title_sort | digital materiality creativity and collaboration in digital design at 3xn architects and gxn innovation |
| topic | Cognition Philosophy of mind Anthropology Architecture Software Design |
| work_keys_str_mv | AT poulsgaardks digitalmaterialitycreativityandcollaborationindigitaldesignat3xnarchitectsandgxninnovation |