All Means Works

Software No. 7, Sonic Navigator

Spatial audio, 2026

A tool for hearing a model. Geometry is rendered as spatialized sound rather than pixels. Walls have a tone. Openings have a silence. A plan can be walked with the ears. Part of an ongoing effort to make CAD legible without sight, built with and for blind designers, not merely about them. [Replace with your own project text.]

Project Team: John Clark, Daniel [LAST NAME], [others]

Radical Accessibility Project, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

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Software No. 6, A Grasshopper Generator (ghx-gen)

XML, 2026

Grasshopper definitions are XML. XML is text. Text can be written by anything that writes text. A generator that writes definitions directly, skipping the canvas, the wires, the eyes. [Replace with your own project text.]

Project Team: John Clark, [others]

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Tactile No. 2, A Drawing You Can Touch

PIAF swell paper, 2026

A pipeline from digital model to raised line. Heat swells the ink. The drawing becomes terrain. Plans, sections, and diagrams read by hand, produced as routinely as a print to PDF. [Replace with your own project text.]

Project Team: John Clark, Daniel [LAST NAME], [others]

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Writing No. 3, On a Non-Visual CAD Pipeline

ACADIA, 2026 [status pending — update on notification]

[Paper abstract or short description here once acceptance is confirmed. Do not publish before notification.]

Authors: [TBD]

Object No. 2, A Mobile BBQ Cart

Design-build, 2026 — In development

A cart. It moves. It cooks. A small piece of social infrastructure for a school of architecture: smoke, gathering, grease, conversation. The follow-up to a monumental table. [Replace with your own project text.]

Exhibit Committee, UIUC School of Architecture

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Software No. 2–5, 53 Functions for Rhino

MCP server, 2025–26

Fifty-three functions. Draw a line. Loft a surface. Ask what is there. An agent speaks; Rhino listens. Modeling becomes a conversation, which means modeling becomes possible for someone who cannot see the viewport. [Replace with your own project text.]

Project Team: John Clark, Daniel [LAST NAME], [collaborators]

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Software No. 1, CLI → JSON → Watcher

Pipeline, 2025

The first piece. A command line writes JSON. A watcher reads JSON. Rhino obeys. No mouse, no menus, no screen required. The architecture of the architecture tools. [Replace with your own project text.]

Project Team: John Clark, Daniel [LAST NAME]

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Tactile No. 1, Laser Fabrication Workflow

2025

From model to cut sheet to physical artifact, automatically. Models you can hold are models you can read with your hands. [Replace with your own project text — credit Ethan's contribution as appropriate.]

Project Team: John Clark, Ethan [LAST NAME], [others]

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Studio No. 8, Eco-Lounges for Superfund Sites

Second-year design studio, UIUC, 2025

Tar Creek. Libby. Iron Mountain. Onondaga Lake. McCormick & Baxter. Sites where the supply chain ended badly. Students design lounges — places of rest — as instruments of remediation, reversing the supply chain one program at a time. [Replace with your own studio text.]

Instructor: John Clark

  1. student work 11
  2. student work 22
  3. student work 33

Studio No. 7, An Updated Chicago Frame

Graduate design studio, UIUC, 2025

A CLT tower on Randolph Street. An 18-foot bay. The Chicago Frame, but in wood, a century and a half later. Paradise on the Prairie. [Replace with your own studio text.]

Instructor: John Clark

  1. student work 11
  2. student work 22

Outreach No. 1–, Discover Architecture

Summer program, UIUC — Ongoing

One hundred high school students. Studios, workshops, a day in St. Louis: the Pulitzer, CAM, City Foundry, the Arch. An annual introduction to the discipline, run as a small institution of its own. [Replace with your own program text.]

Director: John Clark

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Object No. 1, A Monumental Table

Design-build, 2024

A table, but monumental. Built by committee, in the good sense. [Replace with your own project text.]

Exhibit Committee, UIUC School of Architecture

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Map No. 1, Early Chicago Skyscrapers

Interactive map, 2024

Where the frame began. An interactive map of the first generation of Chicago skyscrapers, built as a teaching instrument for a studio that asks what the frame becomes next. [Replace with your own project text / embed the map.]

Project Team: John Clark

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Studio No. 6, Gizmos for the Kankakee River

First-year design studio, UIUC, 2024

Small machines for a river. First projects, first models, first drawings. [Replace with your own studio text.]

Instructor: John Clark

  1. student work 11
  2. student work 22

Exhibition No. 1–, TBH

Exhibition program, UIUC — Ongoing

An annual cycle of exhibitions, workshops, and built objects for a school of architecture. Chaired, charted, chartered. [Replace with your own program text.]

Chair, Exhibit Committee: John Clark

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About

All Means Works is a design and research practice led by John Clark, based in Urbana-Champaign and Chicago, Illinois. The practice makes software, objects, drawings, tactile documents, exhibitions, and studios. Its current research, the Radical Accessibility Project, builds non-visual tools for computer-aided design with blind co-researchers.

John is a Teaching Assistant Professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign School of Architecture. [Add bio, contact, and any LLC / disclosure language your outside-activity agreement requires.]

Contact: jsclark2@illinois.edu

Writings

  1. On a Non-Visual CAD Pipeline (ACADIA 2026, pending)
  2. [JAE article, in progress]
  3. [Book, Oxford University Press, under contract]