Prototyping POST.CODE: A New Address for Medicine & Architecture
[POST After in time or sequence; following; subsequent

CODE 1. A system of words, letters, figures, or other symbols substituted for other words, letters, etc., especially for the purposes of secrecy 2. COMPUTING program instructions 3. BIOLOGY specify the genetic sequence
POST.CODE A group of numbers or letters and numbers that are added to a postal address to assist the sorting of mail]
How will scientists, physicians and architects collaborate in the future? What will professional boundaries look like? In a world where data will be cheap and bountiful, and knowledge transfer between fields both commonplace and vital, what skills will remain essential or become extinct? What conditions will be needed to help students thrive in a Post.Code world within which professional boundaries are rapidly shifting and constantly merging? Very soon, deep learning, prescriptive and automated coding (in vivo and in silico), robotic fabrication and construction, advanced smart materials, and human care by machines will be a new normal in both architecture and medicine. How prepared are we to understand or even help shape that world; a place where mobile and programmable, self-assembling soft architectures can be re-engineered using genetic code? A locale where information is stored in DNA-based supercomputers composed of living cells that make current electronic medical records and data storage architectures obsolete? An address where biosynthetic and other man-made materials can be programmed not only to self-organize, but also to change state in highly tunable ways to transform building morphologies and mobility in over-populated cities? Although these scenarios don’t exist simultaneously and at all the scales described as yet, the individual component pieces, and then some, already exist….and so it’s only a matter of time.
A major intent of this prototype summer studio within MEDstudio@JEFF, and directed by Peter Lloyd Jones and Trudy A Watt, was to begin to expose new ways of thinking, seeing and doing between medicine and design. We aimed to discover new sites of research investigation at the boundaries of these professions for closer examination in the next phase of production, a Spring 2018 studio called POST.CODE. For inspiration, we used the Eames’ canonical short film “Powers of Ten”. Students examined potential sites of disciplinary elasticity and collaboration at multiple scales through time. Over the course of the summer, they zoomed in and out of science, medicine and design while identifying and creating languages and addresses that may help shape their futures. Finally, a repository of information, a travelogue, a datascape — manifested as a hand-made “future cabinet of curiosities” — was produced by the students, creating a turning point for a new type of “extreme collaboration” between architecture and medicine.
“Elasticity is the ability to negotiate change and innovation without letting them interfere excessively with one’s own rhythms and goals. It means being able to embrace progress, understanding to make it our own” Paola Antonelli, Design and the Elastic Mind , MOMA 2008
Axon Student Team: Shannon McLain, Sh’rae Marshall, JP Gonzalez, Rachel Updegrove, Jess Schell with assistance from Liza Kathleen, Mike Koerner and Allison Rojas.
Instructors: Peter Lloyd Jones, PhD and Trudy A Watt, M.Arch


Supported by the offices of the Dean and Provost at Sidney Kimmel Medical College Thomas Jefferson University
