The Association for Computer Aided Design in Architecture — better known as ACADIA — has been hosting annual conferences for almost as long as personal computers have existed. This year's edition, which begins on October 24, is exceptional for two reasons: one, it's going to be taking place entirely online, and two, one of the event's co-chairs is a Daniels Faculty assistant professor, Maria Yablonina.

Yablonina, whose area of expertise is computational design and digital fabrication, joined the Daniels Faculty earlier this year after several years at the Institute for Computational Design and Construction, in Stuttgart. She's a member of ACADIA's board of directors.

ACADIA had originally planned to hold this year's 40th-annual conference at the University of Pennsylvania — but, when the pandemic made that impossible, Maria banded together with a few other members of the ACADIA board (Viola Ago, Matias del Campo, Shelby Elizabeth Doyle, Adam Marcus, and Brian Slocum) to develop an alternative plan.

Transforming the conference into a fully digital event required the co-chairs to rethink some of the basic elements of a professional gathering. The conference's title, "Distributed Proximities," hints at some of the changes that needed to be made. For starters, all of the lectures, workshops, and presentations will (obviously) be taking place on Zoom. But the adjustments didn't end there.

"We've made quite a few changes to the traditional format of the conference," Yablonina says. "One of the big changes that I'm really looking forward to is that we've rethought the whole format of the keynote. Traditionally you would have a single person talking about their work, which in our feeling is a very egocentric format. So we've replaced that with conversations. Every single keynote will have anywhere from two to five participants."

Among this year's keynotes will be "A Conversation on Ecology and Ethics," with Jennifer Gabrys, chair in media, culture, and environment at the University of Cambridge's department of sociology. Gabrys will be sharing a virtual stage with Molly Wright Steenson, the K&L Gates associate professor of ethics and computational technologies at Carnegie Mellon. "The keynote event will feature a presentation of work from both participants as well as a conversation between these two incredible scholars," Yablonina says.

Another keynote, titled "On Data and Bias," will be a discussion between Ruha Benjamin, an associate professor of African American studies at Princeton; Orit Halpern, an associate professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Concordia; and David Benjamin, an associate professor at Columbia GSAPP. The three will talk about the way computation relates to our assumptions about race and gender.

"With this year’s conference lineup we are aiming to extend the range of conversations by speakers from a broad range of fields beyond architecture," Yablonina says. ”For every keynote panel there is an architect as part of the conversation or in the role of respondent. Through this pairing we are hoping to initiate a dialogue about larger societal implications of technology in design."

And the Daniels Faculty will have some representation at the conference. Assistant professor Mitchell Akiyama will be holding a workshop on October 24 and 25 in which he'll be leading participants through a series of guided writing exercises using "Under the Dog Star," a website he created for that purpose. John Nguyen, a student of assistant professor Brady Peters, will be presenting a paper about computational fluid dynamics in building design. Yablonina herself will be presenting a paper, titled "Designing [with] Machines," about the development of task-specific and site-specific robotic systems for architectural purposes.

Pre-registration is required to attend to the ACADIA Distributed Proximities conference. Students can register for free, thanks to support from Autodesk, an ACADIA sponsor. For everyone else, admission starts at $125.

Take me to the Distributed Proximities registration page