Keynote Speakers

This is the story of how we helped Christo & Jeanne-Claude to wrap the Arc de Triomphe in Paris in summer 2021. Not every successful structure is the result of optimization. In arts projects the outcome is often set by the artists from the beginning on and the task of the structural design team is to make a vision come true whilst fully embracing constraints rather than minimizing them.

Intelligence augmentation through mixed-initiative systems promises to combine AI’s computational efficiency with human contextual expertise. In this talk, I will explore a framework for bridging human and artificial intelligence through three core pillars: interpretability, feedback, and augmentation. Central to this vision are co-adaptive visual interfaces that facilitate seamless collaboration. First, it will be examined how interpretable design allows users to diagnose and understand complex models, building the transparency necessary for trust. Building on this, methods for integrating diverse human feedback directly into the learning loop, enabling models to refine their behavior in real-time will be discussed. Finally, it will be demonstrated how these combined elements lead to true intelligence augmentation, presenting workflow designs for computational linguistics that empower humans to solve problems more effectively than either party could alone. The talk will conclude with insights into current challenges and the promising research directions that lie ahead in engineering these symbiotic partnerships.

Design processes are seen as continuous, empirical attempts to create enduring transformative conditions. Here, endurance is understood not as a technical or material quality, but as the capacity and willingness of humans to invest themselves in ideas whose outcomes remain uncertain—to stay with open-ended processes over time. This means working with matter, energy, users, atmospheres, and other agencies, allowing them to reshape both the question and the outcome. Do we care to decide, and decide to care? More bluntly: can we still afford not to care—to treat care as a luxury or top-on rather than a condition of design?

The keynote will address prototypical spatial setups as learning environments for experimenting with and cultivating transformative cultural techniques. Here, speculation becomes a practical method for enabling encounters and debate. Rather than pursuing efficient, final solutions, design can prepare conditions for exchange, collective agency, reuse, and succession—treating architecture and design as a way of shaping spaces that enable what comes next.

The art of designing with the uncontrollable lies in deciding what should be prescribed and what can be left to emerge through local interactions. Nature’s most successful collective builders achieve reliable outcomes without centralized control or global knowledge by using the physical structures they create.  These structures shape local information, so that simple individuals can take actions that lead to collective progress. Drawing on inspiration from termites and honeybees, I will discuss how co-designing morphologies, environments, local behaviors, and planners can translate this concept to autonomous construction, where robots collaboratively assemble brick-like structures and shape granular terrain. The result is remarkably simple agents capable of sophisticated collective construction.

Addressing urgent challenges in built and natural environments, architects must adopt transdisciplinary design-research models that respond to social, environmental, and technological imperatives shaped by advances in computation, material intelligence, and digital fabrication. As our tools become more capable, the following question becomes ever more important: what should the designer decide, and what should be left to the material, the machine, the collaborator, or the environment itself?

This keynote presents collaborative research spanning biology, materials science, engineering, fashion, and architecture, drawing on principles from 3D spatial biology and morphogenesis to establish feedback loops between environmental forces and biological form. The resulting biosynthetic approach integrates analog and computational processes to produce surface architectures and structural systems that respond to both internal programming and external conditions, treating uncertainty not as a failure of control but as a design medium.