TECHNOLOGY | ARCHITECTURE + DESIGN (TAD) invites submissions of original research from scholars, practitioners, researchers, and students for consideration in the upcoming Intelligence issue.

Intelligence resides between sensing and acting. Intelligence, through data-driven technology and virtual experimentation, drives the capacity and catalyzes learning, understanding, and applying knowledge through tacit, explicit, haptic, visual, human, and artificial forms. Through this broad understanding, intelligence need not be future-focused. For instance, indigenous science, biomimetics, and the complex intelligence inherent to informal settlements can inform artificial intelligence (AI) through robotic-assisted manufacturing, machine manipulation, and iterative, modification-based approaches in design. While these processes relinquish some agency to machines, they can also establish creative synergy for designers, ultimately enabling more responsive and responsible built environments.

Intelligence seeks current and emerging research on building automation, smart systems, user-driven design optimization, design recommendation tools, deep learning, design optimization, generative design, spatial reasoning, cognitive modeling, Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), planning, mixed reality, and ethics that rigorously examine the role intelligence can play in the built environment. Emerging fields related to human-machine interaction (HMI), sensor networks, and knowledge representation use artificial intelligence with augmented reality to engage the built environment across scales and fidelities, from smart cities to intelligent materials, from the experimental to the constructed. As machine learning and smart materials intersect with the architectural practice, designers increasingly use sensors to harvest post-occupancy data on building performance and users. How is this data utilized to improve occupants’ safety and well-being or reduce the impact of buildings on the environment? Through intelligence, architects, planners, and engineers turn to “big data” to address global issues and evaluate the impact their designs have on society.

Intelligence invites research investigating how intelligence expands practice (prototypes and workflows) and redefines design agency—who, what, and why—and contributes to the development of new knowledge. Investigations into surveillance and teleoperation seamlessly weave simulation, calibration, and optimization, impacting users across scales. Used ethically, interdisciplinary research in robotics, artificial intelligence, neuroscience, and human cognition can improve design and advance the human condition. However, rapid advances in technology require skepticism and caution, as well as the articulation and integration into our collective behavior to inform new policies, principles, and processes. Intelligence encourages contributions that question how these technologies reframe the efficiency of intelligent design and interrogate its ethical impact in the built environment.