Extending his previous work documenting the postwar nexus of design and computing in North-America and Britain, Daniel Cardoso Llach’s current project Provincializing the digital: Computational Design in Germany after 1950 will examine how German researchers, government, and corporate actors conceptualized and gave meaning to computational ideas and methods in Germany’s design and architectural contexts during this period. Drawing on recent science and technology (STS) and media studies perspectives that complicate a dominant view of computational systems as neutral and universal, the project will help reveal how computational design ideas and methods in Germany emerged in conjunction with specific institutional, political, and material histories. Instead of asking what computation and software might mean ‘for’ architecture and design in Germany, Cardoso Llach is interested in asking what these technologies might mean ‘from’ there.
Daniel Cardoso Llach, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor and the chair of the graduate program in Computational Design at the School of Architecture at Carnegie Mellon University, where he also directs CodeLab, an interdisciplinary laboratory aimed to critically rethinking the role of computation in design
