Cardoso Llach's work explores problems ranging from social and cultural aspects of automation in design, the politics of representation and participation in software, and new methods for using data to visualize design as a socio-technical phenomenon. His recent research includes a book on the cultural history of Computer-Aided Design and numerically controlled machinery that examines how postwar technological projects shaped conceptions of design informing current architectural practices: Builders of the Vision: Software and the Imagination of Design (Routledge, 2015)