Builders of the vision : technology and the imagination of design

Abstract

This dissertation identifies and documents a "technological imagination of design" emerging around the reconfigured discourses of design and design representation by the culture of technology production in the Computer-Aided Design Project, a Cold War era research operation funded by the US Air Force at MIT, tracing it into its contemporary deployment in the technology project known as Building Information Modeling. Exploring the discursive and technological linkages between these two sites, the dissertation outlines the ongoing project of construing technological centrality and universality as the dominant trope in discourses about design production. An expanded critical perspective on design is thus developed that looks at technological systems -such as software- and the cultures that produce them, with their histories and regimes of power, as crucial participants in, rather than as neutral vessels for, the design and production of our built environment. The dissertation ranges from examining the politics of representation, participation and authorship in the systems imagined by members of the Computer-Aided Design Project -in particular that of Steven Coons and Nicholas Negroponte's "man-machine" design systems- to discussing the culture of BIM coordination through an ethnographic portrait and data-visualization of its practice at Gehry Technologies, in two large-scale projects in the United Arab Emirates. As this study demonstrates, technological discourses and artifacts act as brokers for culturally dominant conceptions of design, representation, and work.