Empathy

Preparation for laser cut file

Empathy and the potential of soft skills in architecture

I argue soft skills, often overseen in the design process, are triggered through the interaction with material and that could be a possible guidance for architects in the design decision making. By shedding light on related emotions embedded in the various hands-on processes mediated through videos and images nowadays, empathy and trust are revealed as an important trajectory to enrich collective knowledge and to overthink how we think surfaces today.

 By reflecting upon interactions with material in a conversation essay, model maker Ellie Sampson and I realized that the impact of digitization on the understanding of material and the potential to connect haptic sensations with the visual impressions we encounter in our daily lives definitely needs to be explored more deeply. There is a moment where the digital becomes more integral to a sense of haptic materiality. The related emotions aroused by hands-on work are linked to material literacy that can be revealed in the design process when makers talk about their relationships with the objects they make. According to curator Glenn Adamson, “It would be a mistake to believe that material intelligence is only applied through tactility, via making or touching.”[1] It is not only hands-on engagement with the material that teaches material literacy, but also mediation, which Sampson, her team, and myself had to learn very quickly during the restrictions by Covid-19. The digital, then, is intimately related to embodied experience and bodily memory. It forces one to get to the core of what is seen.  This “new collage of communication”, as Sampson calls it, has great potential to accompany, rather than replace, architects’ usual work habits.

 The ambition of this research is to identify material as a performer and a tracker of tacit knowledge, i.e., material serves as a kind of indicator to track and observe the representation of collective knowledge and to consider its digital and embodied surface: How can surfaces be penetrated and boundaries blurred? Can engagement with material be supportive in this? Emerging from the digital, mediation itself serves as a key tool to reveal material knowledge by following not an object, but the making of an object.[2] In this way, the study hopes to determine who is involved in this process and to what extent, in order to raise a series of related questions that follow the relation between material cultures, knowledge and emotions in the process of making architecture.[3]

[1] Adamson, Glenn. 2018. Fewer, Better Things: The Hidden Wisdom of Objects. New York: Bloomsbury Publishing Inc.

[2] Adamson, Glenn. 2013. Thinking Through Craft. London; New York: Bloomsbury.

[3] Johns, Adrian. 1998. The Nature of the Book

MDF left overs after laser cutting