About

Abel Maciel is an architect and Senior Research Associate at Bartlett Faculty of the Built Environment, UCL. He has extensive experience in a wide range of design typologies and scales, from product and interaction design to large-scale urban complexes and masterplans. He has tutored architectural design and technology at the Architectural Association (AA), the Bartlett School of Architecture, and the Ecole Spéciale d'Architecture (ESA) and Nottingham University.

During his professional career, Abel has worked with some of the world’s leading design and engineering practices such as Foster + Partners, Zaha Hadid Architects, Heatherwick Studio, Herzog & de Meuron, Arup and Bureau Happold, preparing competitions, developing proposals and delivering projects in Asia, the Americas, Europe and the Middle East.

At the conclusion of his Master of Architecture with a focus on biomimetics, Abel was invited to join an Engineering Doctorate in Virtual Environments at UCL, being awarded an EPSRC Scholarship. His research focuses on the understanding of the social, economic and cognitive aspects of collaborative design and how this value creation process informs Building Information Modelling (BIM) technology application. Using multidisciplinary research overarching Ethnography, Game theory and Human-Computer Interaction, Abel has developed radically new models of this complex phenomenon, opening new avenues for further research and being awarded the Bartlett Doctorate Prize in 2014.

He is the founding director of Design Computation Ltd, a specialist consultancy based in London. There, he focuses on the development and delivery of complex BIM, IoT and Blockchain applications working with the British Government in the development and delivery of Multi-Modal Infrastructure Digital Twins. He is a founding director of the Construction Blockchain Consortium and the initiator of the Design Computation Wiki, an open knowledge platform for computational design.