This advanced graduate studio explores emerging design methods that supplant traditional models of design, and suggest a an entirely new model characterized by the deferred authorship endemic to working with complex systems and the distributed agency offered by co-authored works. The theme of work and play guides the investigations, both on methodological and programmatic levels. These investigations include the analysis and design of existing structures of gaming, the hybridization of games with precedent works of architecture that present idealized models of work, and the production of a co-authored parametric design system that utilizes crowd-sourcing technologies.

This studio aspires to provide a context for the exploration of alternative models of authorship implicit in emerging approaches to design based upon parametric and algorithmic processes. In the first part of the semester students do so through the collision of multiple, often seemingly unrelated, activities:

• playing board games
• analyzing mid-century office parks
• discussing the ordering system employed by Amazon warehouses
• becoming micro-laborers on a crowd-sourcing marketplace.

In the second part they seek to apply what they have learned to the design of a space of work. A thread that ties these disparate activities together is the idea of deferred authorship, the act of designing through systems, which stands in contrast with direct authorship, the traditional compositional model of design.