Rules of Possibility: Constructing Design Systems

How do we define systems in which design is simultaneously dependent yet not predetermined? Can we work within that degree of freedom and produce a critical and coherent product? The Irving Innovation Fellowship provides a platform for the development of these research interests and their respective applicability to the studio-based design process. Rules of Possibility: Constructing Design Systems showcases research outcomes that target open-ended design questions driven by process rather than product. The framing, development, and application of these design systems are implemented through investigations in material intelligence and/or techniques of projective representation. The work addresses the structure of design thinking as it pertains to problems of fabrication, representation, cognition, and perception in architecture.

Featured Projects

Plywood Napkins: Revisiting the Fold through Recursion
by Alexander Timmer (MArch ’16), Irving Innovation Fellow, 2016-2017

Ambiguous Pictures: Dynamic Projections of Non-Euclidean Space
by Iman Fayyad (MArch ’16), Irving Innovation Fellow, 2016

Credits

Mohsen Mostafavi, Dean and Alexander and Victoria Wiley Professor of Design
Patricia Roberts, Executive Dean
Michael Hays, Chair of the Department of Architecture and Eliot Noys Professor of Architectural Theory
Megan Panzano, Design Critic in Architecture
Dan Borelli, Director of Exhibitions
David Zimmerman-Stuart, Exhibitions Coordinator