The International Journal of Architectural Computing (IJAC)

About IJAC

Design Agency in Design Research and Architecture

Submissions are invited for the 2014 ACADIA 'DESIGN AGENCY' IJAC issue

The conference theme is intended to highlight experimental research and projects that exhibit and explore new paradigms of computing in architecture. The theme is a purposeful instigation of work that looks at re-defining the term "Agency" through the lens of computational design strategies such as simulation, fabrication, robotics, and novel integrations from science and the media arts.

With Los Angeles as the 2014 host location, this IJAC issue will draw not only upon the region's legacy of architectural experimentation, but also its history of innovation and pioneering in the media arts and engineering. The theme speaks to a purposeful inclusion of both academic and practice based research and designers but also seeks to be inclusive of researchers working at the intersections of computer science, engineering, synthetic biology, gaming, cinema, interaction design, product design, and behavioral sciences.

This IJAC issue will highlight the distributed influence of design decisions in a much larger milieu of data. Today, materials, manufacturing, social behavior, economics, define vast data-sets that can inform the design process. Such driving vectors of non-human agents within the design environment suggest an architecture that is enabled by interdisciplinary collaboration and data mining skills, an architecture that is able to define convergences and embody architectural outputs that potentially lay beyond the conventional process of building. Of particular interest to our call are researchers and practitioners that re-define the notion of agency in architecture, urban design, and design and computation. This involves pioneering techniques and processes in computational design and digital fabrication that operate as the fulcrum of not only solution-based applications but anew design problem construction as the very root of transformative agencies. Intentionally the use of agency is inclusive of discussions of novel design organizations, of novel approaches to artificial intelligence in physical and virtual settings, and of an in depth look at agent based design and emergence and the new found opportunities for design through the coupling of design with these computational paradigms across a range of scales and disciplines. Design Agency will focus on the computational design of work that redefines itself through the new paradigms of cloud, big data, global project delivery, and new forms of collective intelligence in design, architecture, urbanism, fabrication and media arts.

This issue of IJAC will solicit from the conference the best submissions, all of which have taken account of the conference focus of expanding and exploring the notions of Design Agency in and for Architecture, across the range of topic areas that include the following but not limited to: Design Agency, Parametric Agency, Material Agency, Fabrication Agency, Temporal Agency, and Data Agency.


The submissions should be full-length papers (3000 - 5000 words, maximum length 6000 words) complete with illustrations reporting original research or practice. The submissions must adhere to the IJAC journal template. For all papers that are solicited from the conference all authors must take into careful consideration that the work be original and not simply republished. The expectation for the work is for it to be expanded and original.

Papers must be submitted only to the IJAC online system at:
http://www.architecturalcomputing.org/review/author/submit.php

Important dates:
Deadline for submitting papers: November 15
Notification of acceptance sent to authors: December 15
Final papers due: January 15
Publication date: March 2015

ACADIA Guest editors:
David Jason Gerber, (dgerber@usc.edu),
University of Southern California
Maria-Paz Gutierrez, (mpazgut@berkeley.edu),
University of California, Berkeley
Tomás Dorta, (tomas.dorta@umontreal.ca),
Université de Montréal, Canada
Jason Oliver Vollen, (jason@binarydesign.org),
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute


The submissions should be full-length papers (3000 - 5000 words, maximum length 6000 words) complete with illustrations reporting original research or practice. The submissions must adhere to the IJAC journal template. Papers must be submitted only to the IJAC online system at:
http://www.architecturalcomputing.org/review/author/submit.php

Important dates:
Deadline for submitting papers: May 20, 2014
Notification of acceptance sent to authors: June 1, 2014
Final papers due: July 1, 2014
Publication date: September 2014

ACADIA Guest editors:
David Jason Gerber, (dgerber@usc.edu),
University of Southern California
Maria-Paz Gutierrez, (mpazgut@berkeley.edu),
University of California, Berkeley
Tomás Dorta, (tomas.dorta@umontreal.ca),
Université de Montréal, Canada
Jason Oliver Vollen, (jason@binarydesign.org),
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute