Short Abstract

An informal lunchtime gathering for those shaping an Architectural STS community. Participants are invited to bring or wear an artefact from their teaching or research—turning networking into a playful act of convivial, collective identification.

Description

This informal lunchtime meet-up offers a playful counterpoint to the workshop Towards an Architectural STS: Co-Designing a Network of Practices. Where the workshop maps and plans, this meeting performs the emerging community.

Participants—educators, researchers, designers, and students—are invited to bring or wear something that speaks to their way of working: a small artefact from teaching or practice, an object of study, a material sample, a model, a drawing, or an item of clothing. These props become conversational devices—tactile introductions that reveal how we inhabit our methods and disciplines. The aim is to experiment with how an STS sensibility might reshape encounters among architectural researchers: through things, gestures, and shared curiosities rather than institutional profiles.

The hour will unfold informally over lunch. After a brief welcome by the convenors, participants will circulate, share their objects and stories, and sketch ideas for how this energy might continue—through a mailing list, teaching exchanges, or future collaborative events. The meet-up thus acts as a social and material infrastructure-in-miniature, allowing the Architectural STS Network to begin as a performative space of affiliation and a convivial gathering of relations.