INVESTIGATOR(S)/CO-INVESTIGATORS
TBC
LOCATION
LONDON, UNITED KINGDOM
DATE
2013
DURATION
ONGOING
PROGRAMME
TBC
MATERIALS/TECHNOLOGY
TBC
TOOLS/PROCESSES
TBC
PUBLICATIONS/CONFERENCES
TBC
The Fabrication Lab began in 2013, with a small digital workshop, the aim of bringing the limited and aging facility up-to-date, and a £250k fund from the University Centre to invest in new equipment. It soon became clear however that this was a more involved project than it at first seemed. Not only was the task of specifying tools and designing specialist spaces necessary to accommodate them already a serious undertaking, more importantly the project soon revealed a lack of clear direction for which of the many technological possibilities was worth pursuing, as well as serious questions about how they might be used and taught. This lack of established knowledge was compounded by a recognition that the technologies under consideration were by their very nature constantly evolving and improving. Their applications similarly would change and mutate in directions that could not necessarily be foreseen. How therefore to select particular technologies, and how might you effectively integrate them into existing, and long-established teaching and research practices?
David Scott was given the task of leading the project. He re-named the Digital Workshop the Fabrication Lab, transformed the task into an institutionally-based Action Research project of much wider scope, and so began a seven-year journey of speculation, experimentation and implementation to test and innovate new models for what a contemporary Fabrication Lab might look like.
Having trained as both a social psychologist and architect, and having held academic positions in both disciplines at University of Westminster and University College London, the project has been guided equally by social theory and an appreciation of the power of digital technologies for architectural design. The project builds on a 25-year interest in Continental Philosophy, the discursive-turn of the late 20th Century, and especially on the on-going provocation provided by the thought of Michel Foucault. Scott’s PhD thesis tested a novel application of the work of Foucault to the traditional topic of the psychology of values. It explored how socio-historically specific ways of behaving became embedded in psychometric tools, and hence into psychological discourse and universal understandings of cognitive function. It also revealed the limited scope for action in discursive disciplines divorced from direct application of their ideas, and prompted a move into corporate research and development, and subsequently into the inherently applied field of architecture.
Foucault is best known for his innovative and remarkable histories of the prison system, the clinic, madness and sexuality. His detailed accounts revealed the historically-dependent nature of these social phenomena, and hence the historically-specific nature of our own thought, as well as the inextricable connection between knowledge and power. While a significant industry of Foucaultian scholarship continues to debate the historical validity of his accounts as well as the meaning and importance of his work, the underlying assumptions drawn from Foucault’s intellectual tradition - phenomenology, read through Nietzsche and Heidegger - remain rich in potential for guiding applied experimentation in an institutional setting.
Drawing on the thought and traditions of Foucault draws attention to the mutability of apparently natural categories, and the historically-specific institutional and social practices through which they are constructed and maintained. Just as sexuality is not given, but a potentially contested category - and one that has become ever clearly so in the 35 years since Foucault’s death - so too is the territory of interest in the present project. Perhaps both more tangible and prosaic than the subjects of Foucault’s own analyses, but equally open to social construction, and through discursive and institutional forces that are equally more graspable, everyday, and so open to transformation through action research.
Madness is the absolute break with the work of art; it forms the constitutive moment of abolition, which dissolves in time the truth of the work of art.
Throughout his oeuvre, Foucault implicitly questions both the thinking subject and the objects of their thought. Not just two sides of the same phenomenological coin, but interdependent constructions embroiled in complex webs of discourse, and institutional and social practices. Both subjects and objects are not given entities in the world, but are constructed through various and complex dispositifs or apparatuses, as it the notion is often translated. The argument of the present research project is that the technologies at issue and the questions around our relationship to them as users, educators, researchers might also be usefully understood as the result of a dispositif. What would be the outcome of treating both the technologies of interest for architecture and the built environment and the people who engage with them as the products of a dispositif, known for simplicity as the ‘Fabrication Lab’, whatever in practice that might mean? Rather than developing a merely theoretical account what would be the consequences of engaging consciously and deliberately with the many interdependent strands that constitute a dispositif: the heterogenous systems, rules, regulations, practices. Might one sift through these elements as a territory to propose novel solutions and models, and what would be the outcome? Given the pressing and very real problems facing the built environment, not least the growing urgency of the sustainability of our practice, does it offer valuable insights, knowledge and possibilities for addressing the potentially important developments in new technologies?
I don't write a book so that it will be the final word; I write a book so that other books are possible, not necessarily written by me.
FABRICATION LAB
University of Westminster
College of Design, Creative and Digital Industries
35 Marylebone Road, London NW1 5LS
Office@FabricationLab.London
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