Inflections is a series of contributions on topics pertaining to the role that technology plays in relation to how we conceive, build, experience, and teach architecture. Computational design, digital fabrication, AR/VR/XR, and AI have all matured enough to inscribe their own disciplinary modalities within the design fields. The related technologies in these domains of production have had a profound impact on the discipline of architecture and our built environment. The influence of these technologies and their associated systemic practices in diverse facets of everyday life is palpable, ranging from innovations and discoveries that benefit society in health and social networks to how we work and spend our leisure time. This Gradient feed, with contributions and curations by members of the Architectural Computational Design and Construction Cluster (ACDCC) at Taubman College, reassesses the principles and modalities by which we employ technologies for design to characterize our ethos, habits, and ambitions. The ‘angle’ of each feed—bias, oblique, and parallel—will offer up opportunities to express inflections in our current thinking and production. These inflections, underscore our preoccupations, range, mood, attitudes, and pitch.

Inflection

1
—Grammar: a change in the form of a word (typically the ending) to express a grammatical function or attribute such as tense, mood, person, number, case, and gender.
—the process or practice of inflecting words.
2
—the modulation of intonation or pitch in the voice: she spoke slowly and without inflection | the variety of his vocal inflections.
—the variation of the pitch of a musical note.
3
—chiefly Mathematics a change of curvature from convex to concave at a particular point on a curve.

Origin: late Middle English (in the sense ‘the action of bending inwards’): from Latin inflexio(n), from the verb inflectere ‘bend in, curve’ (see inflect)

from the New Oxford American Dictionary