A Communications Primer: The Digital Critical Zone Part 1 Dissertation 2026 Jackie Anderson Cork Centre for Architectural Education | Ireland This dissertation examines Twitch not simply as a media platform, but as a spatial environment: an inhabited digital interior structured by architecture, atmosphere, and mediated social exchange. While streaming platforms are often understood through the lens of communication technology, this research argues that Twitch should instead be read architecturally, as a layered environment in which interfaces, rooms, infrastructures, and communities produce new forms of spatial experience. Echoing Charles and Ray Eames’ A Communications Primer (1953), this dissertation understands communication not as a linear exchange between sender and receiver, but as a layered system of environments, interfaces, symbols, and relations through which meaning is collectively produced. Drawing on Bruno Latour’s concept of the Critical Zone, Twitch is reframed as a complex communicative ecology. Beneath the apparent flatness of the screen lies a layered infrastructure of hardware, software, and networked relations that sustain digital life. Complementing this, Peter Sloterdijk’s theory of Spheres, particularly Foams, provides a framework for understanding Twitch as a network of adjacent yet separate interiors.Through a spatial analysis of Twitch’s interface, the domestic broadcast studio, and the collective intelligence of live chat, this dissertation explores how digital presence is staged, inhabited, and socially produced. A close reading of Hasan Piker examines intimacy, authority, background framing, and mediated adjacency, demonstrating how domestic interiors become public communicative spaces where architecture, objects, and atmosphere actively shape interaction. Ultimately, this dissertation argues that Twitch is not merely watched but inhabited, expanding architectural discourse into the digital realm and positioning online environments as significant spaces of contemporary habitation. Tutor(s) Kieran Cremin Tara Kennedy