Adam Marcus recently co-chaired the 40th annual conference of the Association for Computer-Aided Design in Architecture (ACADIA). Held October 24-30, the Distributed Proximities conference was ACADIA’s first online conference and included two days of remote workshops, followed by five days of conference sessions. Adam and his co-chairs (and fellow members of ACADIA’s Board of Directors) Viola Ago, Matias del Campo, Shelby Doyle, Brian Slocum, and Maria Yablonina organized an unprecedented online gathering that drew over 2,300 registered attendees from across the world. The conference featured six keynote conversations (publicly accessible on ACADIA’s Youtube channel), with 21 participants including leading critical thinkers such as Ruha Benjamin, Peggy Deamer, Jennifer Gabrys, Orit Halpern, and many more.

The conference included a custom-designed online platform (https://proximities.acadia.org), an interactive visualization of the research presented and discussed throughout the week. It uses machine learning algorithms to analyze the conference content, identify key terms, and cross reference these terms with over 13,000 entries in the CumInCAD repository of research presented at ACADIA and its sibling organizations over the past 40+ years.