time-based design

This article integrates a series of diverse projects that together exemplify and interpret the Systemic Approach to Architectural Performance (SAAP) that has been developed by the author. SAAP is a fusion of several process-based fields and their media and agency, namely: a) Systems oriented design; b) Performance oriented architecture; 3) Prototypical urban interventions; d) Time-based design; e) Service design; and f) Co-design, co-creation and DIY. The article presents SAAP's relations to these fields and concludes with their integration and synergy in a 'Real Life Co-Design Laboratory', where collaborative and collective processes are seen as the resulting design objects or rather, objectives.

GIGA-Maps are extensive systems maps that combine and relate large amounts of different kinds of data and data representations, to be used and related in a design process (Sevaldson 2013; Sevaldson 2011; Sevaldson 2015). This mapping has no recipe. It is project related and developed according to its particular needs and speculations. The GIGA-Map series in this paper are exhibiting, presenting and discussing the whole collection of this process-based, visual complexity diagramming that has been developed in the framework of Systemic Approach to Architectural Performance. SAAP seeks to investigate the relation between Systems Oriented Design (Sevaldson 2013), and performance oriented design approaches (Hensel 2012) together with the other processes in architecture in the means of its active agency within overall ecosystem, the co-performance. The particularity of SAAP is to demonstrate and develop theories and methods through experimental practice. SAAP involves Time-Based Eco‐Systemic Co‐Design that is performed by both biotic and abiotic agents, including humans within living built environment. GIGA-Mapping is central to SAAP because it is a tool that visually manages, organizes and relates the complexity within the design-research processes and co-performances. SAAP’s particular approach to GIGA-Mapping is focusing on eco-systemic processes and their co-/re-design processes. It maps and generates their relations, meaning environmental, societal and cultural aspects across the habitats of the different species and the biotic and abiotic agency involved, sharing its habitats and playing a part in overall eco-systemic complex food-webs in real time. SAAP’s ambition is to understand and design for these complexities when they are overlapped and integrated with the built environment. A successful co-existence across species and within the human built environment depends on the development of new design approaches. Thus, SAAP is based on full-scale prototyping in combination with analytical and generative GIGA-Mapping, both placed into ‘real life’ built environment. The direct full-scale prototypical engagement with the life-performing eco-system is interrelated with its diagramming, one updating the other by data and relations in their co-design process. This approach is based on ‘research by (through) design’ (Morrison and Sevaldson 2010; Sevaldson 2010). Taking the notion seriously, it is using the ‘real life’ as a design-research ‘laboratory’. Therefore, SAAP is strongly driven by prototyping in public space, considering GIGA-Maps as well as the full scale prototypes as ‘prototypical urban interventions’ that can drive extensive generative agencies across the communities (Davidová 2004; Doherty 2005) and while doing that, across much larger systems, introducing the necessary shift to Post-Anthropocene.