Computer-Aided Architectural Design Research in Asia
What happens when we accelerate too quickly
The annual Conference for Computer-Aided Architectural Design Research in Asia (CAADRIA) brings together academics, researchers, and practitioners to contribute to the fields of computational design methods, instruments, and processes towards an inclusive future for humans and non-humans. Held in Singapore for 2024, we partnered with conference hosts Artificial–Architecture on the Call for Entries campaign and overall branding.
Constructing new ways of seeing
The theme “Accelerated Design” is an urgent call for critical reflection of and creative action by architecture through a time of perma-crisis. It provokes crucial discussion: Can and should we use technology to accelerate design? If so, to what extent and to what end? Perhaps, design must decelerate instead? Our creative direction attempts to find beauty in this chaos, inviting debate on design’s role amidst accelerated change.
The 2024 edition launched with a distorted version of the CAADRIA logo, visualising the theme of excessive acceleration and pushing clarity to the edge of recognisability. Leading up to the conference, the identity itself becomes a dynamic response, continuously evolving and building upon itself.
The subsequent Call for Entries campaign further developed the branding. As participants submitted abstracts on the website, they were also invited to create unique gradients as a form of human verification. This crowdsourced initiative acknowledged the human input that is typically omitted by CAPTCHAs, at the same time capturing contributions to the AI training dataset. Over four months, we collected over 600 gradients, which were fed into Dreambooth.
A generative loop
Through repeated iterations, the AI model re-generated the gradients, introducing increasing levels of degradation with each output. As each phase borrows and builds upon the previous, this ongoing cycle produced a spectrum of visuals that reflected varying degrees of "tearing", forming the foundation of the conference‘s identity. These generated graphics serve as a powerful metaphor for CAADRIA’s central question: what happens when we accelerate too quickly?
The key visual’s dynamic composition, with input always contrasted against the output, reinforces this generative loop. This visual language is translated into adaptable graphic elements, framing the conference design and segmenting content across touchpoints.