LFA23 Open House

Our open house as part of the London Festival of Architecture gave visitors a unique opportunity to step inside our world and explore our design journey through the latest technologies. It was the first time we have publicly shared our design processes and tools - and a real deep dive into a project life cycle and our world of exploration, strategy, innovation and design.

From carbon measuring, to live sensor utilisation and data analysis we started the journey upstairs with an insight into our approach to research and discovery. Downstairs, the space was broken up into four main areas that each touched on a different aspect of a project; we demonstrated a spatial analysis software that predicts movement, the interior design evolution and user testing in Virtual Reality, Architectural context studies in Extended Reality and many of our Post Occupancy techniques and tools.

In total we had 114 people pass through our door. Beautiful, organised chaos. The conversations and contributions from partners, clients, suppliers, peers and students was pure magic.

As a practice, we advocate the use of digital tools to inform, develop and test our designs, but with the ever growing advances and reliance on technology, we question whether it could be the beginning of a creative disaster - can it in fact limit creative thinking and how far will we let it take over?

It is not black-and-white. We agreed that technology is exciting, useful and saves time and resources. Louise and Mohanad shared impressive examples of how technology has enabled us to go beyond our usual ways of working and deliver exceptional designs and quality.

Oliver highlighted the collaborative aspect of technology which can effectively help us generate outcomes that otherwise would not be possible, or would take humans a long time to achieve.

Geoff challenged this, stating that technology has the ability to produce various outcomes in a very short amount of time which takes away from the creative process, depriving us of problem solving - to fail is to learn. He also expressed the concern that technology could, if it hasn’t already, lead us to a monoculture, where our clothes, music and the food we enjoy is homogenous, lacking in individuality and creativity.

So, can we trust the fire to lead us? Adam beautifully described an analogy of a caveman and woman who discovered a fire which enabled them to continue to see and draw into the colder, darker hours of the evening. However, control of the fire was the critical technology enabling the evolution of humans. Emphasising the importance of regulations and control over technology use.

We drew the conclusion that despite being an incredibly useful tool we should be conscious of how we use technologies, always balanced with human interfaces and never without a meaningful purpose.

Big thanks to everyone who joined us and to our fellow labbers who had a hand in making it happen, showcasing their expert fields and for taking part in the discussions that followed. We had a blast!