Porter has taught studios in urban and architectural design and seminars in design methods and theory. His research has focused on methods and processes of design of individuals and groups. He has led the SMArchS program focusing on these areas for the last dozen years. Recently he has become interested in the integrated study of space, organization and technology in the framework of the workplace, with the conviction that through design there were significant opportunities for improvements in both productivity and a sense of well-being.

Recent publications have included Excellence by Design: Transforming Workplace and Work Practice and The Agile Workplace, both co-authored with colleagues; and, most recently, Design Representation, a study of how designers in a variety of fields represent ideas and employ those representations in their practice, co-edited with Gabriela Goldschmidt. He is currently co-principal investigator of a project entitled Distributed Work sponsored by the Cambridge University-MIT Institute (CMI) and the Electronic Card Wall (EWall) project sponsored by the Office of Naval Research. Both are to reflect on how work can be enabled through space, technology and organizational support. And he continues to write about methods and processes of design. He is part of the department's Design Concepts Group.

As architect Porter worked for Louis I. Kahn in Philadelphia, and on the new city of Ciudad Guayana with the Harvard-MIT Joint Center for Urban Studies. He has served on numerous juries including the Aga Khan Award for Architecture for which he also served as a member of its Steering Committee during its first nine years. He has done master planning and been design advisor for many institutions, and is a partner in Four Architecture, Inc.

Porter joined the faculty in 1967 and was dean of the school from 1971 to 1981 where he introduced and supported reforms aimed to make education in architecture and planning more humanly and socially responsive. With these objectives, he founded the school's Laboratory of Architecture and Planning to encourage and support field-related research. He and Dean Kilbridge of the Harvard GSD led a major study of architectural education funded by the Andrew Mellon Foundation. With Oleg Grabar, professor emeritus of Fine Arts at Harvard, he founded the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture in 1979 and was its co-director until 1985. In 1979, with Professor Donlyn Lyndon of Berkeley, he co-founded Places, a Journal of Environmental Design, and served as co-editor until 1989.

Porter is a Fellow of the American Institute of Architects, a member of the Boston Society of Architects, and holds a certificate from the National Council of Architectural Registration Boards. He is also past president of the National Architectural Accreditation Board. He earned his BA from Yale College in 1955, the MArch from Yale's School of Art and Architecture in 1957, and the PhD from MIT in 1969. He joined the MIT faculty in 1967 and retired from it in 2004. He now conducts research and advises a few students.