SCAN brings together researchers around questions related to the implications of digital in architectural design. After having tackled the themes of digital sketching (2005), digital imagery (2007), environmental approaches (2009), collaborative space (2010), complexities of digital architecture models (2012), digital model interactions (2014), and the link between morphological modeling parameters and constructive specification parameters (2016), this 8th edition, organized by the AAU UMR at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture of Nantes (France), extends the debate to the dynamics of immersion-emersion and its contributions to the design of architectural and urban projects.
In line with the conclusions of previous editions of the seminar, we agree that digital architectural design fundamentally transforms the project process, and cannot be reduced to the mere use of a set of software tools. The introduction of systematic measures (in the parametric sense) in the continuous process, from the model to the materialization, interact with all the other dimensions of the project, in particular historical, cultural, societal, aesthetic and economic aspects. The design process then benefits from potentially very diversified inputs, both in terms of responsiveness, conversational capacity, replicability and transposability, but also from taking into account the contextual elements in terms of environmental impacts: microclimate, energy behavior, mechanical and thermal structures, life cycle analysis components, modes of living, etc.
This design assistance, a real ubiquitous, multifaceted lever with multiplier effects, gives us ability to see features and elements of context that were previously inaccessible. It also immerses us - at the risk of submersion - in the site, in the model, in the data, in the project... an overabundance of enveloping flows in perpetual need of attention.
SCAN'18 proposes to question the tension between multiple immersions and emersions (and the implied notion of attention), with reference for example to pervasive numerical devices that allow the subject to make joint use of both an in-situ immersed point of view and as an ex-situ and synthetic vantage point. This question, as well as all those that it implies, has many implications for the research and pedagogy conducted in our institutions, and more generally for architectural and urban production.
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