Research @ AI+EDL
The wicked problems posed by climate change, pollution, and scarcity of resources represent major challenges for architectural practice, education, and scholarship. To address these problems, the discipline will need to evolve its theoretical models, rethink its boundaries, and develop new technologies for analysis and design creation that use data more creatively and effectively. This research program endeavors to address these challenges through a trans-disciplinary practice that merges the fields of artificial intelligence (AI) and architectural design. The resulting research agenda combines information, probability, and computational theory with architectural theory to inform an information-centric approach to the study and design of the built environment. This research program is called Spatial Informatics and is centered around the development of new critical and creative approaches to the use of data in the analysis of the built environment and in the design process that highlight the phenomenological, physiological, social, cultural, environmental, and ethical dimensions of design.
CARL aims to contribute knowledge and develop technologies that will make for a more environmentally and socially sustainable built environment, while enabling and extending human imagination and agency in the design process. The research is organized around the following areas of study:
Generative Methods: New conceptions of the role of information in the design process
The creation of artificial intelligence-based design tools for architectural and urban design.
Augmented intelligence-driven architectural design tools.
Discriminative Methods: New conceptions of the role of information in the analysis of the built environment
Applications of machine learning for analysis and prediction of health outcomes in relation to urban morphology.
Applications of machine learning for the analysis of historic urban development and its relation to sustainability.
