University of Calgary, Laboratory for Integrative Design
Contact: Branko Kolarevic and Vera Parlac
The Laboratory for Integrative Design (LID) is an interdisciplinary research group that brings together researchers from multiple disciplines. The researchers at LID operate in areas of overlap that exist between design, its allied disciplines of engineering and production, and other fields, such as computer science, material science, mathematics and biology.
The operative domain of LID is integrative design, in which methods, processes, and techniques are discovered, appropriated, adapted, and altered from elsewhere, and often digitally pursued. As a research entity, LID projects a fundamentally different attitude towards collaboration, one that needs not be limited to the professions and disciplines comprising the building industry. The LID designers and researchers engage design as a broadly integrative endeavor by fluidly navigating across different disciplinary territories, and deploy algorithmic thinking, biomimicry, computation, digital fabrication, material exploration, and/or performance analyses to discover and create processes, techniques, and products that are qualitatively new. Scientific and engineering ideas become starting points of the design investigation. Mathematics and geometry are re-embraced as a rich source of ideas in articulating form, pattern, surface and structure in architecture, and collaborations with mathematicians are sought out.
