Dr. Chris Speed Biography

Chris Speed is a research active designer working within the field of Digital Architecture, Human Geography and Social Computing developing new forms of spatial practice that transform our experience of the built environment. He is currently a Reader in Digital Architecture at the Edinburgh College of Art and has a background as an artist, freelance multimedia designer and art editor at a large publishing company in London. Since 2002 Chris has been Programme Manager for BA/BSc Digital Art & Technology at the University of Plymouth (formerly BSc MediaLab Arts) leading the staff and developing curricula to establish one of the best new-media design courses in the UK.

His research focus is best characterised by his doctorate entitled ‘A Social Dimension to Digital Architectural Practice’ which presented a critical opportunity for Digital Architecture to develop new forms of practice that embrace social computing principles within a cultural geographical model of space. During the doctoral process and the publication of papers through established conferences and journals, Chris has sustained a critical enquiry into how digital technology can engage with the field of architecture through a series of shows, publications and events that used the annual Arts Council funded Architecture Week event to explore how digital systems can affect spatial practices: V01D exhibition and edited book 2001, Catalogue exhibition and Arts Council digital teachers pack 2002, IBEAM Fonts by Architects exhibition 2003 and CD-Rom, and Out of Scale exhibition 2004. These series of shows spanned four years and demonstrated how digital technology, if used as a critical medium, can reveal architectural discourse as well as offer new platforms for expression. Chris is also deeply involved in the conceptual and practical development of a series of applied digital architectural projects including: Arch-OS - Operating Systems for Architecture (www.arch-os.com) , a infrastructure to stream social, network and environmental data to the internet, Cornwall Culture (2006), a large social networking project for Europe’s first ever region of culture, and the Centre for Sustainable Futures Green Screen (2007-08), a 50m2 LED matrix located within an atria window of a large urban building.

Chris’ approach to teaching digital media is based upon his research methods and includes working with a broad range of digital systems from electron microscopes to mobile devices such as GPS, video iPods and phones to support creative enquiries across the built environment and landscape. He has a fostered a relationship with HP Labs, Bristol, to support the student use of their MediaScape platform, and is a collaborator on a web based spatial / acoustic archive using GPS technologies with University of Colorado, Boulder; Politecnico di Torino, Italy; University of Brescia, Italy. These relationships have supported seminars and practice based projects with his own students and collaborative workshops with other institutions such as the Bartlett and the Hyperbody Centre at the Technical University of Delft.

Chris’ works have been published in international books and journals, presented at conferences across the world and has had projects commissioned and distributed in a variety of mediums.