Professor John Abell specializes in integrative architectural design, interdisciplinary urban design, and critical theory particularly as these intersect with aesthetic experience, material craft and advanced design technologies. Specific research topics are as follows.
• Community based urban architectural design investigations integrating public health, ecology, and social capital, design information modeling and visual preferencing methods.
• Theories and histories of modern design thinking, modeling, practice and programming emphasizing design innovation and optimization in social contexts: creative-discursive research, rhetorical investigative practices, generative processes, modeling material behaviors, analogical and digital modeling methods and technologies, prototyping methods, algorithmic and parametric design modeling, semi-hierarchical systems, recursivity, systems theory.