Emilie El Chidiac

computational designer · researcher · creative technologist · architect

I work with design, technology and minds.

How do you explain a complex, honestly boring technical subject so someone leans in instead of glazing over?explaining thingsJUL 2026

A floor plan tells you which rooms touch. It will not tell you which rooms you can actually reach, and the gap between those two drawings is where the architecture is hiding.adjacency is not accessJUN 2026

Right now a building is a fixed guess. Someone chose the ceiling height and the window size years before you arrived, and you live inside their averaged assumptions whether they fit you or not.buildings that respondJUN 2026

You learned what a room does to you by being in rooms. Nobody sat you down with a dataset.experiences are dataMAY 2026

You don't walk into a room and average your experience. You walk in and the thing that's wrong is the thing you notice: the glare, the echo, the cold draft on the back of your neck.comfort as dataMAY 2026

I build things that give a room a score. The obvious next question, and the one I would ask me, is what happens the day somebody uses that score to decide who gets the room.when the tool scores peopleAPR 2026

Machine learning borrowed the word space from us, and I would like to check what it did with it.latent spaceAPR 2026

For most of my life the drawing was the output. You designed the thing, then you drew it to prove it existed.drawing as interfaceMAR 2026

For thirty years we've been getting very good at Building Information Modeling: every beam, every duct, every clash, tracked to the millimeter.behavior information modelingJAN 2026

The usual choice with an old building is a trap: treat it as a museum piece no one may touch, or drop a glass-and-steel box in the middle and call it modern.heritage meets new techDEC 2025

Neuroaesthetics is the unglamorous name for a question everyone already feels: why does one room settle you and another keep you on edge?neuroaestheticsDEC 2025

Evolutionary search is what I reach for when a problem is too tangled to solve head on: describe what good looks like, then let a population of designs breed, mutate, and compete until something clever falls out.evolutionary searchNOV 2025

A physics solver is the most honest collaborator I have: it doesn't care what I intended, only what I actually built.physics solversNOV 2025

Computation is not the same as using a computer, and separating the two took me longer than I would like to admit.computationOCT 2025

A large language model is a machine that guesses the next word. That is not me being kind to you, that is the whole thing.what an llm actually isSEP 2025

Generative AI made the inspired gesture free. Anyone can produce a thousand renders before lunch, and a render is a promise, not a product.generative aiDEC 2023

I started in a lab strapping headsets onto students to see whether a lesson lands harder when you can walk around inside it.extended realitySEP 2022

When the art class was asked who here dislikes drawing, mine was the only hand that went up. Awkward.connecting the dotsJUN 2020

How do you explain a complex, honestly boring technical subject so someone leans in instead of glazing over?explaining thingsJUL 2026

A floor plan tells you which rooms touch. It will not tell you which rooms you can actually reach, and the gap between those two drawings is where the architecture is hiding.adjacency is not accessJUN 2026

Right now a building is a fixed guess. Someone chose the ceiling height and the window size years before you arrived, and you live inside their averaged assumptions whether they fit you or not.buildings that respondJUN 2026

You learned what a room does to you by being in rooms. Nobody sat you down with a dataset.experiences are dataMAY 2026

You don't walk into a room and average your experience. You walk in and the thing that's wrong is the thing you notice: the glare, the echo, the cold draft on the back of your neck.comfort as dataMAY 2026

I build things that give a room a score. The obvious next question, and the one I would ask me, is what happens the day somebody uses that score to decide who gets the room.when the tool scores peopleAPR 2026

Machine learning borrowed the word space from us, and I would like to check what it did with it.latent spaceAPR 2026

For most of my life the drawing was the output. You designed the thing, then you drew it to prove it existed.drawing as interfaceMAR 2026

For thirty years we've been getting very good at Building Information Modeling: every beam, every duct, every clash, tracked to the millimeter.behavior information modelingJAN 2026

The usual choice with an old building is a trap: treat it as a museum piece no one may touch, or drop a glass-and-steel box in the middle and call it modern.heritage meets new techDEC 2025

Neuroaesthetics is the unglamorous name for a question everyone already feels: why does one room settle you and another keep you on edge?neuroaestheticsDEC 2025

Evolutionary search is what I reach for when a problem is too tangled to solve head on: describe what good looks like, then let a population of designs breed, mutate, and compete until something clever falls out.evolutionary searchNOV 2025

A physics solver is the most honest collaborator I have: it doesn't care what I intended, only what I actually built.physics solversNOV 2025

Computation is not the same as using a computer, and separating the two took me longer than I would like to admit.computationOCT 2025

A large language model is a machine that guesses the next word. That is not me being kind to you, that is the whole thing.what an llm actually isSEP 2025

Generative AI made the inspired gesture free. Anyone can produce a thousand renders before lunch, and a render is a promise, not a product.generative aiDEC 2023

I started in a lab strapping headsets onto students to see whether a lesson lands harder when you can walk around inside it.extended realitySEP 2022

When the art class was asked who here dislikes drawing, mine was the only hand that went up. Awkward.connecting the dotsJUN 2020

About

I will not pretend I can fill a blank notebook from nothing. What I am good at is judging what the machine hands back and steering it. Someday that might be for a cursor instead of a person. Dystopian or utopian?

We build for the eye sometimes, which helps. Mostly we build for function, which is counterintuitive, isn’t it? We should be building for us to function at our best, not just the building.

So I build the instruments: Sensi scores a floor plan across six senses, NeuroSpace estimates how a room reads to the brain and shows its weights so you can disagree with them.

It was never about being the most interesting person in the room. But the most interested one: what is x doing to y?

This is what's on my mind · What's in yours? >

© 2026 Emilie El Chidiac. All rights reserved.

Emilie El Chidiac | Design Technologist. Computational tools that model how architecture affects the people inside it. This portfolio needs JavaScript; reach me at chidiacemilie@gmail.com or LinkedIn.