Moderator: Jon Goodbun, Environmental Architecture at the Royal College of Art

Dr Jon Goodbun trained as an architect and specialised with two additional masters degrees in algorithmic scripting on the MSc Computing and Design (Topological Manifolds and Multi-Perspectival Space with Prof Paul Coates at UEL) and historiography/theory on the MSc Architectural History (Empathising with Abstraction with Prof Adrian Forty at Bartlett). Goodbun’s research interests explore architecture in relation to cognition and the environment. His 2011 doctoral thesis – The Architecture of the Extended Mind – made a specifically spatial and architectural contribution to Gregory Bateson’s conception of an ecology of mind, by drawing upon and extending three significant contributions from the Marxian tradition concerning cognitive mapping, the production of space and the production of nature. Goodbun co-wrote the one million euro Scarcity and Creativity in the Built Environment EU HERA research project, which resulted in several publications including The Design of Scarcity (Strelka 2014), and his broad-ranging work has been published widely in Journal of Architecture, Architectural Design, Architects’ Journal, Architecture Today, CAN, AJAR, e-flux and Radical Philosophy. Goodbun has received various research grants including an RIBA research award for his work on the political ecology of concrete, and he has supervised one RIBA Research medal winning PhD thesis (on scarcity and informal housing), and one RIBA Silver Medal. Goodbun’s recent research has been based in the archive of Gregory Bateson at UC Santa Cruz, looking at the seminal anthropologist’s work with ecological, cybernetic and urban models. Building on this work, he is currently preparing a broad meta-research bid on The Systems of the World in which he develops a number of concepts including a ’post-representational’ understanding of cognitive mapping as a ‘dialectical space’ of empathy and alienation, and abduction and affordance.