About

Design Studio 18 (DS18) is a postgraduate MArch Studio at the School of Architecture + Cities, University of Westminster,in London. The digital platform hosts the extraordinary creative student work undertaken with the main purpose to:
 

1. to present and archive the programmes, research & creative student outputs each year;

2. to position the work of DS18 within the broader intellectual, scientific and aesthetic fields; 

3. to invite dialogue and debate for new organisational systems in the global state of ecological and climatic emergency; 

4. to provide a reference for past and future iteration of the studio paths

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Climate Change / Un-Sustainability

The context of our global climate and ecological emergency provides the foundation for all DS18 design research investigations. Alongside the sciences, we believe that the arts and architecture has a critical role in playing out and exploring future scenarios, testing the effects of changing environmental processes upon life and design, whilst using the project as a tool to communicate and represent these often intangible global threats to new audiences and in new ways.
 

Data / Computational Tools

We aim to ground projects through directed and appropriately rigorous levels of research. We gather and build datasets, employ cartographic methods and experimental diagrams to record, illustrate, and analyse these wide ranging conditions and complex relationships. We use computational design tools to process these, to simulate and explore them across ranging scales, and prepare or directly use their outputs to inform an evidenced based design process.
 

Design / Representation

We encourage individually led and original design projects, exploring multi-programme briefs and new typologies, driven by context and of appropriate project scale. Our objective is to deliver these through new and creative forms of representation - to celebrate complexity and communicate the vast assemblage and entanglement of project themes, relationships, scales, actors and material.