GUEST SPEAKERS

Jordan Lacey

Ph.D., Senior Research Fellow, School of Design, RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia

Jordan Lacey is a transdisciplinary artist, who specializes in soundscape design and the creation of public sound art installations. He was recently awarded an Australian Research Council (DECRA) grant titled Translating Ambiance (2019-21). This project combines biophilic design and ambiance theory to discover new techniques for the creation of sound art installations. 

More about Jordan Lacey

He is author of Sonic Rupture: a practice-led approach to soundscape design (2016, Bloomsbury Publishing) and author of the forthcoming Urban Roar: a psychophysical approach to the design of affective environments (2022, Bloomsbury Publishing). He is based in the School of Design at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia and is an associate editor for the Journal of Sonic Studies, which is based in the Netherlands.

Michael Fowler

Ph.D., Technische Universität, Berlin, Germany

Michael Fowler is an independent researcher whose work is interdisciplinary. He is primarily interested in the examination, analysis, composition and design of exemplary sound-space. He studied music in Australia (University of Newcastle) and the USA (University of Cincinnati), and pursued an international concert career as a pianist and electronic musician working with some of the most notable composers of the late 20th Century including Karlheinz Stockhausen, Steve Reich and Milton Babbitt. 

More about Michael Fowler

During his career as a musician he performed in Greece, Australia, Canada, Japan, China, USA, Mexico and Germany. He has won acclaim from critics including those writing for The New York Times, Atlanta Constitution-Journal, Birmingham News, and Sydney Morning Herald. After spending a year in Japan studying Japanese aesthetics in 2002 he took up a Post-Doctoral position at the Spatial Information Architecture Laboratory in Melbourne Australia. He has published on topics including the semiotics of Japanese garden design, concepts of sound and listening in architecture and landscape architecture, the music of Karlheinz Stockhausen, and the utilization of techniques from mathematics and AI for representing indeterminate musical spaces in the scores of John Cage. His artistic practice has also included the presentation and design of immersive sound installations that have been staged in Australia, China and Japan. He is an alumnus of the Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung research fellowship program.

Natalia Olszewska

NAAD – Università IUAV and Politecnico di Milano; Co-founder of Impronta,
a Neuroscience Consultancy for Architecture

Researcher and practitioner working between the fields of neuroscience and architecture. Underwent unique educational training in medicine (Jagiellonian University & Tor Vergata), neuroscience (University College London, École Normale Supérieure and Sorbonne), and ‘neuroscience applied to architectural design’ (Università IUAV). Gained professional experience working at Hume, a science-informed architecture and urban design studio created by Itai Palti, where worked as Lab Lead and participated in projects for big companies and individual clients.

More about Natalia Olszewska

A faculty member of NAAD (Neuroscience Applied to Architectural Design) Master organized by Università IUAV and Politecnico di Milano. A fellow of The Centre for Conscious Design, home to the Conscious Cities movement, and a global think-tank that searches to address social challenges through urban design, co-responsible for the ‘Neuroscience and Architecture’ and ‘Design for Wellbeing’ domains.
Co-founder of Impronta, a neuroscience consultancy for architecture helping environmental creators to optimize human experience of architectural and urban spaces.

Andrew Witt

Professor in Practice in Architecture, Harvard Graduate School of Design, United States

Andrew Witt is an Associate Professor in Practice in Architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, teaching and researching on the relationship of geometry, data, and machines to perception, design, construction, and culture. Trained in both architecture and mathematics, he has a particular interest in a technically synthetic and logically rigorous approach to form. He is also co-founder, with Tobias Nolte, of Certain Measures, a Boston/Berlin-based design and technology studio that combines imagination and evidence for systemic and scalable approaches to spatial problems. Their clients include large manufacturers, material fabricators, government agencies, infrastructure companies, investment funds, medical startups, and cultural institutions. The work of Certain Measures is in the permanent collection of the Centre Pompidou, and has been exhibited at the Pompidou (twice), the Barbican Centre, Futurium, the Museum of the Future, and Haus der Kulturen der Welt, among others. Witt’s personal work has been featured at the Storefront for Art and Architecture. In 2017 Certain Measures were finalists for the Zumtobel Award in both the Young Professionals and Applied Innovation Categories.

More about Andrew Witt

Witt has a longstanding research interest in the disciplinary exchanges between design and science, particularly through the media and visualizations of mathematics. He is the author of Formulations: Architecture, Mathematics, Culture (MIT Press, 2021), an expansive examination of the visual, methodological, and epistemic connections between design, mathematics, and the broader sciences. He is also author of Light Harmonies: The Rhythmic Photographs of Heinrich Heidersberger (Hatje Cantz, 2014), the first English treatment of German proto-computational photographic hacker Heinrich Heidersberger’s light-drawing machines. For the Canadian Centre for Architecture he has authored Studies in the Design Laboratory, a trilogy of case studies that examine how and why architects who developed laboratories in the 1960s and 1970s and what these leboratories reveal about the cultural research practices of design.

He is a fellow of the Canadian Centre for Architecture and Macdowell, a Graham Foundation grantee, a World Frontiers Forum Pioneer (2018) and Young Pioneer (2017), and a 2015 nominee for the Chernikov Prize. Witt has lectured widely, including at the Venice Biennale, Library of Congress, Yale, Princeton, MIT, The Bartlett, The Berlage, Stanford, UCLA, Berkeley, ETH, and EPFL, and his research has been published in venues such as AD, Log, Project, Detail, Harvard Design Magazine, e-Flux, Surface, Space, Linear Algebra and its Applications, and Linear and Multilinear Algebra, and Issues in Science and Technology. He has been awarded patents for geometric rationalizations of complex geometry and large-scale collaborative software systems.