Abstract

In leading architectural offices where digital technologies have become de facto part and parcel of the architectural design process, it has become pointless to talk about “architectural design” and “digital technology” as separate phenomena. In fact, those offices showcase advances in their designs through combined developments in process, tools, teams, materials, and research. Far from being a passive addition to conventional processes, digital technologies transform the whole spectrum of architectural endeavour. Architects and offices in the front of these development showcase a particular competence set that is distinct from others, which we propose to call “digital leadership.” We define “digital leadership” as the “integration of distributed knowledge from social sciences/humanities and digital technologies through the integrative artistic power of Architectural Design applied to the built environment as a real-world research and design laboratory.” Although there have been many digital pioneers since the early 1960’ies, we can now see digital leadership as a more mainstream movement. However, there is no unified framework or theoretical understanding of digital leadership. In this paper we report on work carried out on four universities which has the aim to build such a framework.