Sofia Paisiou

Position

• PhD Student

Office: 328

Phone: +41 26 300 93 85 / Fax: +41 26 300 97 46

Email: sofia DOT paisiou AT unifr DOT ch

Personal Homepage : http://www.unifr.ch/geosciences/geographie/paisiou

Please contact me via email or phone to fix an appointment

My research interests revolve around the coupling of following themes:

a.Knowledge creation / innovation in competitions

Competitions are complex decision-making processes, in which different fields of activities are entangled with each other and knowledge creation is produced by ‘knowledge acting upon knowledge’. Looking judgement in competitions from this “knowledge� perspective, lead us to the hypothesis that the quality of the decisions and the results of the architectural judgement can not be judged in binary terms of good or bad, right or wrong. The decisions of the jury are developed in an environment of collective practices, where knowledge and understanding emerge.

b. Diagrammatic thinking

The staring point of this research was the methodology developed in the first year of the PhD in order to collect the data from the archives ( Hypathie II by P.Frey / ACM , www.seals.ch, http://www.hls-dhs-dss.ch/) in a conceptual framework of complexity and assemblage theories. The empirical diagrammatic schemas developed in the first year trigger a conceptual research of the diagram as a tool/method for addressing complexity in design. During this research on diagrammatics, concepts from wider philosophical debates (Plato, Gehring, Foucault, Deleuze, Serres, Guattari) to applied design theories and reasoning (N.Cross, Boland and Callopy, J.P.Chupin, F.Dogan) were profoundly studied.

c. “Tracing and mapping�

My empirical research is an ongoing data collection from 19th century competitions in a “complexifying� database based on E/R diagrammatic models. In order to “trace and map� “evolutionary trajectories� of competitions, different ways for generating relations between the data are studied like data mining (using WEKA clustering algorithms) and biological algorithms ( NK models / fitness landscapes). Furthermore the database is used as a base for the cooperation with the department of Informatics of University of Fribourg , DiVA group (PhD student I.Boyandin) in order to visualize the data flows and relations in interactive spatiotemporal maps.

One first sample of this cooperation can be found at: http://diuf.unifr.ch/people/boyandii/ac/

• A qualculative inquiry into urban design competitions, Joris Van Wezemael, Jan Silberberger, Sofia Paisiou, Zehn Liang , Conference Publication: Architectural Competition - Nordic Symposium, October 2008

• Was Sie schon immer über Architekturwettbewerbe wissen wollten, Jan Silberberger, Joris Van Wezemael, Sofia Paisiou, werk, bauen + wohnen 04|2010

• Spaces of knowledge creation. Tracing knowing-in-action in jury based sense-making processes, Jan Silberberger, Joris Van Wezemael, Sofia Paisiou, Ignaz Strebel, International Journal of Knowledge-Based Development (IJKBD)
• Assessing Quality: The Unfolding of the “Goodâ€�, Joris Van Wezemael, Jan Silberberger, Sofia Paisiou, Scandinavian Journal of Management
• Mattering the “Res Publicaâ€� – Swiss architectural competitions as a Foucauldian Dispositif, Joris Van Wezemael, Jan Silberberger, Sofia Paisiou, Pierre Frey, disP

• Dia-grammatics:a cartography of complexity for design

DCC workshop Stuttgart 2010

• A walk in design space-evolutionary trajectories of architetcural competitions

International conference of Architetcural competitions Copenhagen 2010

• Dia-grammatical Cartography of planning competitions

AAG conference Washington 2010

• Géographies d’architecture

Group Lecture „Political Geography“ 2010

• Complexity in M.Serres

Group Lecture „New Approaches“ 2010

• Design Competitions – a procedural analysis on two spatio-temporal scales

Geocolloquium, March 2010, University of Friborug (together with Jan Silberberger)

• Knowledge in Action In Architectural Competitions

Conference Constructing Knowledge / Das Wissen der Architektur 2009 Aachen

• Tracing complexity in Swiss Post-Office competitions in the 19th century: Two conceptual approaches

AESOP workshop Manchester 2009

• Methodology for complexity: POPULATION OF COMPETITIONS

Group lecture EPFL 2009

• A framework for a methodology for complecity

AESOP conference Thessaloniki 2008