The programme, twelve weeks
Wednesday 23 September to Wednesday 9 December 2026. Twelve three-hour sessions, 10:00 to 13:00, online, every one recorded. Beside them, 89 hours in your own time and a technical dossier that grows a layer a week.
The shape of the term
Two weeks of grounding, a field fortnight, then eight weeks of deep dives, each one landing a layer in your project.
- Weeks 1 to 2
- The kit Everything you need to go into the field: the methods, the sources, the recording tools and the models you will reason with. Nothing is held back for later.
- Weeks 3 to 4
- The field No live class and no lunchtime events. The MArch cohort is in Rome. Everyone works a site.
- Weeks 5 to 11
- The deep dives One subject a week, most with a guest who works in it. Each week adds a layer to your project, and it goes on the table in the third hour.
- Week 12
- The seminar Ten projects presented, ten dossiers deposited in the Living Commons.
Every Wednesday, the same four hours
Three hours are the module. The fourth is shared with AT6020 and AT6031, and you take it if you want it.
- 10:00 to 11:00
- Taught hour The week's technical framework, where it comes from, and the arithmetic under it.
- 11:00 to 12:00
- Guest or workshop An invited speaker on the week's subject, or hands on the week's method.
- 12:00 to 13:00
- Working seminar Two projects on the table, the other eight reading them.
- 13:00 to 14:00
- Shared hour, optional Open across the three CCAE micro-credentials. Where a guest stays for open questions.
Weeks 1 and 2: the whole kit, before the field
The first two weeks are front-loaded on purpose. You go into the field in week 3, so everything you need to work there is in your hands by the end of week 2: the methods, the sources, the recording equipment and the models you will reason with. No introductory fortnight that saves the real material for later.
Week 1, Wednesday 23 September. Doing research on a technology
Maroun takes the whole session. What a technical framework is, what a technical dossier has to carry, and what the seminar paper has to argue. Then the research methods themselves: how you build evidence about a piece of building technology, where the sources are, how a claim gets anchored to one, and how you record the way any of it was made.
Then the tools, the resources and the online tutorials, which stay open all term: the AECO2 BIM Canvas, the Emergy Explorer, infrared.city, Datum, and Givoni building climatology for climate data and building physics. You leave week 1 having chosen your project from the ten.
Recording and survey. The field kit is issued and demonstrated this week: 3D scanning and LiDAR capture from a phone or tablet, photogrammetry, and how to record a site so the record is still usable in week 10.
Week 2, Wednesday 30 September. Many models, and anticipatory design science
Three bodies of work, taken together because none of them is sufficient alone.
Scott E. Page on many models. One model of a situation is a position. Many models of the same situation is a method. Page's REDCAPE names what a model is for: Reason, Explain, Design, Communicate, Act, Predict, Explore. Every project declares which of those its models produce.
Marina Alberti on hybrid ecosystems. Cities That Think Like Planets: Complexity, Resilience, and Innovation in Hybrid Ecosystems (2016) is where scenario planning meets a city read as a coupled human and natural system. This is the frame the field weeks record into.
Buckminster Fuller on comprehensive anticipatory design science. The emphasis this year is anticipatory, and the word is doing work. Anticipatory design science asks what the whole system will require and designs for it in advance, which is the argument of Critical Path (1981). Speculative design asks what might be and stages the question. Both are legitimate and one of them is on this module. If your project ends in a provocation, it stopped early.
Atlassing, and cartography that is not a site plan. The second half of the field kit: inverted cartography, archaeological cartography, and multi-scalar atlassing. How to draw what the standard drawing leaves out, and how to keep a drawing honest about what it claims.
Week 2 closes by naming the deep dives ahead, so the field weeks get recorded with them in mind: emergy accounting, the digital twin beside the instrument, sensing, geogames and unbuild. Take the measurements in the field that week 6 will ask you for. There is no second visit.
Week by week
| Wk | Date | Session | Works on |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Wed 23 Sep | Doing research on a technology. The module, the methods, the tools, the online tutorials, and the field kit including 3D scanning and LiDAR. You choose your project. | The whole toolkit |
| 2 | Wed 30 Sep | Many models, and anticipatory design science. Page on many-model thinking and REDCAPE; Alberti on complexity, resilience and innovation in hybrid ecosystems; Fuller on comprehensive anticipatory design science. Atlassing, inverted and archaeological cartography. Shared hour: AI fluency and the four competencies, before your first output. | Models, atlassing |
| 3 | Wed 7 Oct | Field fortnight. No live class, no lunchtime event. The situated survey. Record the site: scan it, draw it, walk it, photograph what a drawing will not hold. | Your own site |
| 4 | Wed 14 Oct | Field fortnight. No live class, no lunchtime event. Constructional and structural systems read from what is standing, and the first pass at stock, process and flow. | Your own site |
| 5 | Wed 21 Oct | The atlas comes back. The fortnight's material on the table and read together. Public space as a technical proposition, and what a city is for. Guest: public space, and the journal that carries it. | The field-trip atlas |
| 6 | Wed 28 Oct | Complex adaptive systems: stock, process and flow. The vocabulary the whole module runs on, put on your own site. Then Odum's ecological energy accounting: emergy and transformity, the available energy of one kind used up, directly and indirectly, to make the thing. | Emergy Explorer |
| 7 | Wed 4 Nov | The model of the building: BIM, digital twins and simulation. What a twin contains, what it leaves out, and what a simulated number is worth. Building physics and climate data underneath it. AIARG briefing. Guest: BIM, digital twinning and AI-driven environmental simulation in practice. | AECO2 BIM Canvas, infrared.city, Givoni |
| Sat 7 to Sun 8 Nov | AIARG 2026, Architecture in the Critical Zone. The All-Ireland Architectural Research Group annual conference, hosted by CCAE at University College Cork. The cohort attends and brings it back to week 8. | ||
| 8 | Wed 11 Nov | The Critical Zone, ecology and scale. The conference read back, with the soil, water and living systems a building sits in treated as part of its technical description. Which of your claims survive a change of scale band. Guest: ecology, coastal resilience and the Sustainable Development Goals. | Datum |
| 9 | Wed 18 Nov | The instrument beside the twin: sensing and IoT. Instrumentation, sensor networks, and what a measurement is worth once you know how it was taken. Where a reading and a model disagree, and which one you believe. Guest: the Internet of Things and sensor networks. | Digital Twin and Sensing, Wellbeing and Occupancy |
| 10 | Wed 25 Nov | Geogames for urban design and community engagement. A game as a research instrument: how you collect spatial reasoning from people who do not draw, and what changes when the people affected help design the mechanics. Guest: participatory geogames in planning. | simSPACE, Solving for Zero |
| 11 | Wed 2 Dec | Unbuild, reuse and retrofit. The technical case for keeping a building standing, and the harder case for taking one down. Unbuilding has an energy bill, and this is the week it gets calculated. Guest: adaptive reuse and retrofit. | AECO2 BIM Canvas |
| 12 | Wed 9 Dec | Seminar. Ten projects presented, ten dossiers deposited in the Living Commons for the next cohort. | The commons |
The October field fortnight
Weeks 3 and 4 fall inside the MArch study trip to Rome, which runs from Monday 5 October to Friday 16 October 2026. No live class runs and there are no lunchtime events across that fortnight.
Both weeks are released as recorded sessions with a set field task, and both count toward the twelve. The task has the same shape wherever you are: record a building and the street it stands on, scan what you can, note what is being maintained and what is being let go, and take the measurements the later weeks will ask for. The MArch cohort does it in Rome. Everyone else does it on a site they choose, with the advantage of being able to go back.
The field-trip atlas is the instrument the fortnight feeds. It was built on Marseille for 2025-26 and is being rebuilt on Rome.
The guest series
Invited speakers across the term, each in the week their subject belongs to.
Guests take the 11:00 to 12:00 hour with the AT6012 cohort and stay for the 13:00 to 14:00 shared hour, which is open to learners on all three CCAE micro-credentials.
Names announced as each acceptance lands
Invitations are out. Each speaker is named here once they have confirmed the date, and not before. Several taught on AT6012 in 2025-26 and have profiles in the CCAE mentors and guests collection already.
The module studies the platform it runs on
Every deep dive above works on a live surface of the ENGAGE platform, and your findings go back into that surface. How the platform is built is itself on the syllabus, at DevOps, because a tool you cannot inspect is a tool you cannot criticise. Running alongside is Solving for Zero, the participatory action research course for community-led climate research, which carries the method for doing research with the people a project affects.
Dates read from the UCC module descriptor at ucc.ie/en/at6012, updated 7 August 2026, and cross-checked against the CCAE delivery schedule. The Rome fortnight and the AIARG 2026 weekend are read from the ENGAGE events record. Weekly subjects and guest placement are the module's own design and are subject to confirmation. Programme revised 24 August 2026. Module brief · The ten projects.