Dear friends and colleagues,

We are pleased to announce our Call for Papers for the 8th Design Modelling Symposium, which will be held at the University of the Arts Berlin, Germany from 26 - 28 September 2022.

While “Towards Radical Regeneration” sets the framework, the symposium aims to provide a critical perspective on current advances in computational methods in the fields of Architecture, Engineering and Construction in the light of the unfolding climate and biodiversity crisis.

On behalf of the DMSB 2022 Advisory Board, we kindly ask you to contribute papers on innovative research and building practice projects.

Conference Topic

“Technology is the answer, but what is the question?” famously asked Cedric Price to an audience of architects and engineers in 1966. For researchers, educators, and practitioners in the Architecture Engineering Construction (AEC) fields, the question could not be clearer, nor the answer more urgently needed. In the age of the growing inequalities, climate crisis, ecosystem collapse, the AEC sector accounts alone for almost 40% of the greenhouse gas emissions worldwide, it is responsible for eco-systemic changes and plays a central role in creating and perpetuating social injustice. Among the many campaigners, communities, institutions, and governments all across the world that have declared a state of emergency, what are the radical measures we can take to change the way we plan, build, operate, maintain and dismantle our built environment?

The Design Modelling Symposium 2022 aims to provide critical perspectives on current advances in computational methods in the field of AEC in this age of crisis and hope. Recent advances in design and construction technology may hold the promise to help us trace a new path, but, at the same time, they hold the threat of turbo-charging existing destructive paradigms. Our collective practices are tantamount to many uncontrolled planetary experiments, deploying technologies and practices at unprecedented scales first and worrying about the consequences later. We urgently need to negotiate a myriad of global and hyper-local equilibria between the built and natural environment.

By synthesizing artistic, theoretical, and technological perspectives and positions, the symposium aims to challenge innovative digital techniques in the design, materialization, operation and assessment of our built environment, examining them in relation to their impact on the future of societies and the environment. In this context the digitalization of design seems to offer multiple routes to identify the material, social, ethical, ecological, and other dimensions of new, necessary, and radically measured equilibria.The conference is structured around four thematic areas that explorer almas in which new, radical measures need to emerge, spanning from the tools that enable design, simulation, and materialization to new ways of approaching the relationship between built and unbuilt environment.