Laboratory for Values in the Built Environment

Laboratory for Values in the Built Environment (ViBE Lab),

The ViBE Lab is an academic research group created to explore questions about the built environment that are too emergent or represent values that may not have clear alignments with client-based fee structures or traditional project timelines and scopes of work in professional practice. This research infrastructure holds Elizabeth's work in the academy, including applied research, speculative design, curatorial work, installations, and writing.

ViBE Lab research is focused upon creating generalizable knowledge about the ways in which our built environment is changing in response to the emerging imperatives of the 21st century. Alongside Supernormal, which creates built and immediately actionable projects in professional practice, the research group asks how and where the mechanics and instrumentation of design practice must shift to encounter the intersecting complexities of technological change and environmental and social crises. Both territories purposefully engage the fraught line between core disciplinary values and the externalities that shape design from the outside in.

The research group, housed at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, seeks to create knowledge that enables practitioners in the built environment professions to design and plan our urbanizing world by defining and building upon values that are consistent with the development of meaningful and sustainable 21st century communities. The transdisciplinary work joins quantitative and qualitative approaches to better understand and imagine the future of our built world. Researchers develop and employ scalable systems of design and analytic planning methods to make tangible and systemic impact, and to explore the risks and potentials of emerging technological capabilities such artificial intelligence to encounter our pressing environmental and social crises.

As such, the work of the research group seeks to better understand the DNA of the urban systems driving stasis and transformation in the built environment. It is concerned with uncovering, making visible, and operating upon the technological, political, and financial constructs and their underlying values that guide design and planning practice. The approach is heavily rooted in the development and use of technology to understand, change, and create scalable and sensitive approaches to design and planning practice.

Elizabeth is Principal Investigator in the Laboratory for Values in the Built Environment. The ViBE Lab is a collaborative research endeavor, which is co-created with Harvard GSD urban planning professor and Principal Investigator Carole Voulgaris. It is part of the Laboratory for Design Technologies research collective at the Harvard Graduate School of Design.