Improving access to digital design knowledge—specifically methods and processes—could help address this concern. In scientific publications outside of architecture, the methodology section and technical appendices are critical to verification and advancement of the field. If an experiment cannot be duplicated, the validity of the result is called into question. The same standard does not seem to apply in computational design and digital fabrication, as the descriptions of projects are seldom detailed, transparent, or instructive enough to permit replication.

By allowing for learning through playing, ARchitect provides alternative ways of gaining knowledge about design and architecture and empowers non-experts to take active and informed positions in shaping their future urban environments on a micro-scale, rethinking conventional market relations and exploring emerging personal and public values. The ARchitect game challenges conventional participatory design where an architect plays an essential role in facilitation of the design process and translation of end users’ design proposals. In contrast, the proposed game system allows non-architect players to autonomously produce and access design solutions through embedded computational simulation by an AR application, thus giving an equal chance to non-professionals to express their design visions and become aware of potential implications of their ideas. By providing free access to the game contents through the ARchitect platform and a playful user experience by which design principles can be learned, this game will inspire the general public to engage in conversation about home design, eventually spreading architectural literacy to less-privileged communities.

This paper argues that critical computation integrates two strands of theory and practice in a seamless way. The theory originates from the tradition of critical theory, and reveals the underlying algorithmic biases behind pervasive technologies such as the scholarly work of Ruha Benjamin, Slavoj Zizek and Yuval Harari. The practice uses the technology itself in a critical approach as way to reflect our privacy or as a strategy to undermine various forms of power structure and to promote forms of resistance such as creative works of Diller Scofidio + Renfro, Laruen Lee McCarthy and my own practice.

This paper first provides a brief theoretical context to the notion of critical computation. Then by differentiating between technological determinism and intersectional affordance, it aims to provide a lens through which to study surveillance computation. This paper attempts to avoid any form of technological determinism. Rather than rehashing arguments as to whether computation and in particular surveillance is inherently good or bad, it aims to take an “intersectional feminist affordance” approach to show what constitutes the gaze and surveillance, and to consider what strategies of resistance might prove to be effective in art and design practices.