Mission

The concepts of architecture and cities, ingrained since the dawn of technological civilization as the means by which humans consciously shape their environment, are now being reevaluated in light of the rapidly expanding and evolving information technology, which profoundly influences our industries, daily life, and society. With the advent of computers decades ago, and innovations in information processing and rapidly evolving communication technology have not only had an enormous impact on our design work, production system, operation management, and usage of all kinds of artifacts, but also begun to redefine the values and meaning we derive from our experience, creation, and construction of the environment by human bodies with the flow of both real and virtual information. This paradigm shift raises profound questions such as what is the role of architecture and cities in our human society, what is the creative act of humans in making artifacts, and what is the values of the perception of space and environmental information for humans.
Informatics is described as "the study of the principles and techniques involved in the generation, exploration, expression, storage, management, recognition, analysis, transformation, and transmission of information, It aims to bring meaning and order to the world and creating social value through information," and is expected to play a vital role in reshaping existing academic systems from an information perspective across disciplines. We assert that the essence of architectural informatics lies not in the superficial use of information technology but in adopting such an informatics perspective. It requires an awareness of the deep-seated restructuring of knowledge and value systems currently underway.

Here, the structural changes in urban socioeconomics, the industrialization of creating virtual spatial experience, and other expanding new fields due to innovations in information technology maintain strong continuity and interaction as a constructive consciousness of space and environment. Reconstruction from an informatics perspective will greatly facilitate cooperation among various scientific findings and industrial developments that share an informatics foundation. Architecture and its related fields have amassed intellectual knowledge over humanity's long history, and are rooted in existing industries, economies, cultures, and societies. This is why architectural informatics possesses a unifying force that facilitates the amalgamation of diverse and advanced theories, technologies, and industries related to information, and has the potential to spearhead scientific advancement by challenging conventional wisdom through interdisciplinary exchange.

Launch History

Before the Society's inception, we engaged in various discussions and in the summer of 2017, the initial plan for the Society began to take shape. One of the founding elements was the regular meetings of volunteer members who were at the forefront of both practice and research.
The December 2017 issue of the "10+1 website" (operated by LIXIL Publications, no longer updated since March 2020), a platform for architectural and urban discussions and critiques, we published feature articles titled "Toward Architectural Informatics". These articles contained papers by and interviews with the volunteer members.
Subsequently, we held a series of six public events over the course of a year to foster further discussion with experts from various fields. All records were published in the series "Preparatory Meetings of the Architectural Informatics Society". These meetings offered stimulating topics and collectively attracted by a total of more than 1,000 people, greatly aiding the initiation of this society.

Activities of the Society

In fiscal year 2021, our first year after founding the Architectural Informatics Society, the main focus is to establish the framework of the Society's activities. We envisage that the main pillars of our activities will be organized as follows: expert committees are established to play a central role in planning and operation; members are invited to participate; each activity will commence during fiscal year 2021; and the budget and plan for fiscal year 2022 will be prepared.

Organization & Committees

Member