Volume I of the ACADIA 2020 Conference Proceedings contains the collection of Technical Papers describing research presented during this year’s conference (October 24-30, 2020) as well as transcripts of the six Keynote conversations that served to anchor each day’s discussion.

This year’s conference included panels dedicated to the discussion of Ecology & Ethics, Data & Bias, Automation & Agency, Culture & Access, and Labor & Practice, followed by a closing discussion on Speculation & Critique. Conceived as a series of conversations, these are intended to encourage a different type of critical, issues-focused discourse as well as the contextualization of the community’s production within that discourse.

The work published here foregrounds these themes while interweaving them with the presentation of the computational design expertise of the ACADIA community, with topics including architectures of care, augmented construction, robotics, programmable matter, biological interactions, machine learning, and disrupted practices, among many others, and panoramas spanning from the nano to the urban.

At a time of profound disruption brought about by the global pandemic and coinciding with important sociopolitical events, Distributed Proximities seeks to provide a platform for the continuity of technical discourse while amplifying the space for a dialogue that also recognizes the impacts of the social in all aspects of the research.