New Standards
New Standards
13 October 2022
Time
6.30 PM
Location
AA Lecture Hall, 36 Bedford Square
New Standards will identify and confront some of the barriers to architecture, its education and practice, and consider how these can be overcome to embrace wider forms of creativity. Each event in the series will address the idea of comfort to challenge the idea of ‘standards’ as a bare minimum or one-size-fits-all approach. Together, we will question how we might better provide comfort in all its nuanced forms.
This first event in the New Standards series will consider the senses in architectural education and practice. Architectural Designer Chris Laing will present the work of Signstrokes and the Deaf Architecture Front, artist Aaron Williamson will share his public space performances celebrating ‘Deaf Gain’, and architecture student Poppy Levison will share her experiences as a blind architecture student and discuss how architecture can benefit from decentering the visual.
The second event in the series will explore movement, and our different experiences of how we pass through spaces, how long we get to spend in them, and how we define and can defy expectations of movement in places of domesticity, education and practice. Pip Jackson will share her work on inclusive design and co-design across UCL, the City of London, the GLA, Camden Council as well as experience working with Andrew Walker - founder of the Environmental Access course at the AA in the 1990s. Christopher Scarffe will present his work examining how spatial design and the built environment play a role in empowering or disabling differently-abled minds and bodies.
Neurodiversity, Thursday 27 October
The third event in this series will focus on how we can embrace the potential of neurodiversity to broaden creative practices. Architect Ab Rogers will share experiences of being a dyslexic designer, offering insight into a design career with a neuro-diverse slant by covering the importance of experimentation, education, being hands on and believing in your medium. Graphic designer Christian Boer, creator of the Dyslexie font will describe the unlearning of graphic design rules required to create the accessible typeface and the impact this has had on how people perceive text in the world around them. Helen Kane will discuss the new Design for the Mind standards, highlight neuroscience findings, and share her experiences of neurodiversity influenced design - such as trauma informed design.
For the fourth event in the New Standards series, Kathryn Timmins (GLA) and Ellie Cosgrave (Publica) will discuss how our cities and spaces can be better designed to consider the needs of those who identify as women rather than always requiring them to adapt to spaces designed for men. They will reflect on this through research developed for the Mayor of London around the safety of women, girls and gender diverse people. They will be joined in conversation by AA graduate Thomas Faulkner whose diploma project worked with survivors of domestic abuse to transform architecture from a complicit weapon into a safe space. He will discuss this process as well as how he is continuing this work through his current practice.
Queerness, Thursday 24 November
In the fifth event of the New Standards series, Queer Aided Design, a platform that supports queer architecture students and space makers, will host a workshop. Exploring shared and plural sensibilities, this workshop will centre the exchange of personal stories of queer spaces and space making within and outside of architecture schools. The workshop will be hosted by Mary Holmes and Thomas Phillips of QUEER AIDED DESIGN. Stories will be shared by REGNER RAMOS about Cüirtopia, a mapping project that reimagines how we register, represent, and document queer spaces from within the Caribbean, LO MARSHALL who will talk about their research and approach to communicating queer spaces across different contexts, and ADAM NATHANIEL FURMAN who will share stories from their book Queer Spaces.
The final event in the New Standards series this autumn will reflect on different notions of comfort in the spaces we design and use, how comfort has been standardised, and how we should interrogate this classification to move beyond the limitations of frameworks. Jordan Whitewood-Neal will discuss his research addressing disability and the tension between accessibility and retrofitting - exploring the history of disability at the Architectural Association, Dr. Jos Boys will discuss her alternative handbook for ‘architecture, dis/ability and designing for everyday life’ and Marsha Ramroop will discuss the intersectionality of inclusion and cultural intelligence.
All conversations in the series will take place around a communal table to facilitate an open and comfortable discussion between the presenters and attendees. Free food and drink will be available throughout.
The series will have British Sign Language interpretation. Ramps will be in place to enable access to the AA buildings. A quiet room will be available. In order to enable those still vulnerable to Covid-19 to safely attend the events, we encourage everyone to wear masks where possible. Please do not attend if you feel unwell and are experiencing any symptoms. The room will be well-ventilated and have areas of distanced seating.
Please get in touch to let us know of any additional access requirements that you might have and how we can best accommodate these. If you are unable to attend physically but would like to participate in the event remotely please email publicprogramme@aaschool.ac.uk
The New Standards event series is organised by the AA Public Programme team with special thanks to Jordan Whitewood-Neal for the conversation, collaboration and guidance.