IN PROCESSDSGN 401
Transscalar Design Studio III
Scale: Small
Theme: Cosmos
Across cultures and throughout history, humans have developed instruments, observatories, calendars, maps, diagrams, rituals, monuments, and architectures through which cosmological phenomena could be perceived, measured, interpreted, embodied, and shared. The studio examines these devices not simply as representations of knowledge, but as instruments of attention: designed constructions that make otherwise diffuse, invisible, slow, distant, or abstract relationships available to human perception.
WHERE DO YOU START?Masters of Design
Guest Lecture & Workshop
Presented to the inaugural UBCO Master of Design cohort, Where Do You Start? challenges familiar accounts of design as a problem-solving practice. Moving through five provocations—being, friction, arrangements, attention, and bearing—the lecture asks what becomes possible when designers stop standing over the world in order to fix it and begin standing with it: attending to the relationships, tensions, and unrealized possibilities already present.
The accompanying workshop invited the cohort to turn these questions toward their emerging collective practice. By mapping what keeps finding them, the frictions they encounter, and the futures they believe are at stake, participants began to establish a shared bearing—not a predetermined destination, but a way of orienting themselves toward what matters. Because design may not begin with knowing what to make. It may begin by learning how to notice, starting close in, and listening to what kind of future is already asking us to participate.
HERE, TOGETHERDSGN 404
Disciplinary Studio in Architecture
The studio asked fundamental questions like what is architecture? How does it relate to the world as it is and what it could become? What does it mean to practice in a time of climate crisis, political tension, social isolation, economic inequity, and technological disruption? What if architecture isn’t about objects, but about relationships? What if its core discipline is relational thinking? If so, what kind of civic life could it make possible? If the discipline has lost credibility through abstraction and autonomy, how might it be reinvented? How must the discipline evolve? What if architecture is no longer what we think it is? What if it is more? More what, exactly?
This is what this studio set out to explore.
Joshua’s work intersects multiple disciplines and mediums: architecture, visual communication, artefact-making, creative direction, research and pedagogy. A diverse range of professional and educational experiences as helped shape his understanding of the relationships between human psychology, landscape, culture, and the built environment. At the core of Joshua’s work is an enduring interest in how humans change, how we change the world, and how the world, in turn, changes us.