Technologies of the Virtual Other: Bodies, Users, and Avatars

Architecture today is most often produced and represented in virtual interfaces: proprietary apps, CAD/BIM programs, image editors, and scripting environments. But these instruments, designed for designing, often make certain assumptions about who architecture’s subjects are. For whom, for instance, is BIM made? What makes an ideal user? In representations such as scale figures, users, and avatars, software applications imagine subjects through their orchestration of behaviors and configuration of identities. Setting aside space-, form-, and object-making, this essay unpacks various means through which othering practices occur in virtual design environments and the values represented in the contexts of architectural software.