Short abstract:

As the architectural landscape embraces new tools capable of synthesising diverse datasets, the evolving significances of data and its stages of institutionalisation offer critical insights for architects in considering the technological dimension of design action within data-rich environments.

Long abstract:

In recent years, there has been a growing interest in incorporating data into architectural design, particularly to tackle complex urban challenges. The development of facts and technologies on data towards urban applications is an ongoing process which emphasises the interconnected network between data production, its sources, its registering devices and the actions needed for its synthetical application.

At the intersection between architecture making and data practices, potential outcomes lie with developing synthetical tools capable of producing complex assemblages of data. Therefore, exploring how data can transform design processes becomes a key investigative node for architects to reflect on potential shifts in their competence, their role, their prosthesis and the environments of project production.

Urban laboratories and research centres contribute to this transformative process by crafting meaning, associations and advanced tools around data. Here, experimental conditions and readings become part of architectural practices when specific inscription devices are adopted to collect data and describe specific phenomena.

Data becomes a powerful nonhuman actor to the design process: it represents the mediated trace of the phenomena it describes, allowing for it to be registered and read. The process of collection, analysis, synthesis is not neutral, quite contrarily carries on and modifies a very social and technical network of interactions. Data practices for architectural projects are not only showing the multiplicity of actors of its network of production, but they are also reshaping meanings, materialities, inscription devices and technologies operated by architects to design.