Conference Agenda
Overview and details of the sessions of this conference. Please select a date or location to show only sessions at that day or location. Please select a single session for detailed view (with abstracts and downloads if available).
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PAPERS: Discourses in Design Research: Critiques, Black-Boxes, and Translations Location: 40 George Square, LG.11 Zoom Link Accessibility: https://www.accessable.co.uk/the-university-of-edinburgh/central-area/access-guides/george-square-40-lecture-theatres Session Chair: Haian Xue, College of Design and Innovation, Tongji University | |
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The black box in spatial planning: visualizations of indeterminacy in cybernetics and model theory 1: The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong S.A.R. (China); 2: Southern University of Science and Technology, Shenzhen, China This paper traces the historical and conceptual role of the black box as a diagrammatic figure in planning theory. Emerging from pre-war radio circuit jargon, and first theorized in cybernetics, the black box articulated a productive tension: it acknowledged the indeterminacy of future contingencies whilst concealing moments of executive discretion. Alongside cybernetics, the black box became an omnipresent yet elusive figure in 1960s and 70s spatial planning. Against the backdrop of contemporary debates on explainable AI (XAI), this history has acquired renewed significance for designers. Examining a corpus of planning diagrams produced over fifty years ago, the paper shows how black boxes functioned both as heuristic instruments and as sites of epistemic constriction. The black box variations reveal how spatial planning negotiated between automation and human judgement for decades before current AI debates. Revisiting this historical figure recontextualizes how design View Paper: https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2026.1891
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