Rivka Oxman


Rivka Oxman is an Israeli architect, researcher, and professor at the Technion Institute in Haifa. Her research interests are related to design and computation, including digital architecture and methods, and exploring their contribution to the emergence of new paradigms of architectural design and practice.

Life and career

Oxman graduated from the Hebrew Reali School in Haifa in 1966. She received graduate and undergraduate degrees from the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, where she later became a professor and Vice Dean for Teaching at the Faculty of Architecture and Town Planning. She has been a Visiting Professor at Stanford University and Delft University of Technology and held research appointments at MIT and Berkeley. She has worked at the University of Sydney and Kaiserslautern University.
She married fellow architect Robert Oxman, and they have two daughters, Neri and Keren.
In 2006 she was elected as a Fellow of the Design Research Society for her work in design research. She is an Associate Editor of Design Studies, and on the editorial board of other journals on design theory and on digital design.
In 2010 she and her husband co-edited a special issue of the journal Architectural Design on “New Structuralism" – the convergence of new design, engineering and architectural technology to a new mode of synthesizing materials and creating space. In 2014 they edited the book Theories of the Digital in Architecture, an overview of the field with chapters from dozens of contributors. Rivka Oxman also edited special issues of Design Studies on Digital Design and Parametric Design Thinking.
In November 2017 Oxman was awarded an Honorary Doctorate for her research on theories of digital design and exploring the contribution of digital technologies to novel paradigms in design and architecture by the Universitat Internacional de Catalunya.

Publications

Academic papers

Oxman has published papers in scientific journals, conference books, and as invited chapters in books.
Oxman's public lectures and keynotes tend to be on digital design, education, computation, and design cognition.