Ali Fard / Design Research
Ali Fard is a researcher, designer, and educator. Fard's work operates at the intersection of design and global urban processes. He is particularly interested in the spatial imprints of technology and the urban disposition of infrastructure, and how design research can help ground the operational complexity, spatial hybridity, and territorial scales of large technical systems. Fard has been involved in a range of award-winning projects that reinforce design's critical and multiscalar role within the territorial dynamics of contemporary urbanization. His writing, research, and design work have been published in journals, including MONU, MAS Context, Bracket, Telematics and Informatics, and Harvard Design Magazine, among others, and he has lectured and presented his work widely.
Fard is the co-editor of NG7: Geographies of Information (Harvard University Press, 2015), and is currently working on a book manuscript that further elaborates on the relationship between technology platforms and global processes of urbanization. Fard received his Doctor of Design (DDes) in architecture and urbanism from Harvard University, and his Master of Architecture (M.Arch) from University of Toronto.
Ali Fard is currently an Assistant Professor at the University of Virginia School of Architecture, and was the co-director of Op.N until 2019. Before joining UVA, Fard was a research associate at the Urban Theory Lab at Harvard Graduate School of Design and held teaching positions at the Harvard GSD and University of Waterloo where he was a Lecturer in Architecture and Urbanism. He served on the editorial board of the New Geographies journal from 2013-2018.