The Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD) has announced Design Academy Eindhoven program head Marina Otero as the winner of this year’s $100,000 Wheelwright Prize in support of her research proposal titled ‘Future Storage: Architectures to Host the Metaverse.’

Through the grant, Otero will look to explore the new architectural paradigms of data stores while considering the potential of digital infrastructure to combat some of society’s most pressing and immediate challenges. She has already begun fieldwork in France, the Netherlands and UK, and will further expand her research to include Singapore, Australia, Nigeria, the U.S., Iceland, Sweden, and Chile as a result of the prize's newly-gained backing.

"Data centers might not seem like an exciting place for an architectural project," the first-place winner explained. "However, the huge scale of the operations of the data industry and its pervasiveness and increasing importance in the contemporary world–coupled with its openness to innovation and concurrent pressures to find better socio-ecological models–creates a fertile environment for experimentation and action."

Otero was selected over a field of shortlisted finalists that included Summer Islam, Feifei Zhou, and filmmaker and UT-Knoxville adjunct professor Curry J. Hackett. A former Fulbright Scholar and co-curator of the 2021 Shanghai Art Biennial, Otero’s research has garnered her recent recognition from the Graham Foundation and Design Trust for its unique investigations into societal and spatial alternatives. Her Wheelwright project will therefore become an extension of this research, and, as Otero made clear in her statement, in the end see the creation of a universal user’s guide that can be adopted globally.

“While her title sounds futuristic, the issue is anything but: Marina recognizes the very urgent challenge of storing data in and for today’s world,” GSD Dean Sarah M. Whiting said in a press statement. “Her research will highlight innovations in data storage architectures and infrastructures, recognizing current inequities and scarcities, but also the potential for how data can transform entire communities worldwide through these new civic infrastructures and their reach. In her capacity as head of the social design masters at the Design Academy Eindhoven and also as director of research at the Het Nieuwe Instituut, she has already laid the groundwork for this important topic, ensuring the impact of her Wheelwright output, which will result in the first manual for global data center architecture design, as well as open-source course material and public programming.”

"While there is an urgent need to find new ways to understand progress, imagining alternative futures in current circumstances is proving troublesome. In this context, the proposal is a deeply optimistic project that considers other worlds possible: most anthropocentric, ecological, and plural," the 2022 cycle winner added finally. "The prize reaffirms my confidence in the ability of this research to bring about new paradigms for consuming and storing data, expressly to make a difference."