PARAMETRIC TENDENCIES AND DESIGN AGENCIES (original) (raw)

Design Agency: Prototyping Multi-agent Systems in Architecture

Computer-Aided Architectural Design Futures -- New Technologies and the Future of the Built Environment Celani

This paper presents research on the prototyping of multi-agent systems for architectural design. It proposes a design exploration methodology at the intersection of architecture, engineering, and computer science. The moti‐ vation of the work includes exploring bottom up generative methods coupled with optimizing performance criteria including for geometric complexity and objec‐ tive functions for environmental, structural and fabrication parameters. The paper presents the development of a research framework and initial experiments to provide design solutions, which simultaneously satisfy complexly coupled and often contradicting objectives. The prototypical experiments and initial algo‐ rithms are described through a set of different design cases and agents within this framework; for the generation of façade panels for light control; for emergent design of shell structures; for actual construction of reciprocal frames; and for robotic fabrication. Initial results include multi-agent derived efficiencies for environmental and fabrication criteria and discussion of future steps for inclusion of human and structural factors.

Design Agency

Communications in Computer and Information Science, 2015

This paper presents research on the prototyping of multi-agent systems for architectural design. It proposes a design exploration methodology at the intersection of architecture, engineering, and computer science. The motivation of the work includes exploring bottom up generative methods coupled with optimizing performance criteria including for geometric complexity and objective functions for environmental, structural and fabrication parameters. The paper presents the development of a research framework and initial experiments to provide design solutions, which simultaneously satisfy complexly coupled and often contradicting objectives. The prototypical experiments and initial algorithms are described through a set of different design cases and agents within this framework; for the generation of façade panels for light control; for emergent design of shell structures; for actual construction of reciprocal frames; and for robotic fabrication. Initial results include multi-agent derived efficiencies for environmental and fabrication criteria and discussion of future steps for inclusion of human and structural factors.

Artificial Intelligence and Emergence in Architecture: A Multi-Agent Based Model for Design Processes

The purpose of this paper is to provide an alternative approach to traditional design process formulation and elaboration. In contrast to traditional models of design process fundamentally defined by the abstract manipulation of objects, this study recognizes that the re- sources available for rethinking architecture are to be found in a reformulation of its theory and practice. This reformulation should be based on non-linear design processes in which dynamic emergence and invention take the place of a linear design process fixed on a particular object evolution. Design is possible to be defined in two different and commonly confused ways; one as the process of design- ing or design activity and the second as the product of designing. In this study, we are concerned with design as a process to emphasize the misconceptions, derived from studying design products solely. Therefore, we propose a change from a design knowledge based on objects to a one focused on design as a network of ...

Aesthetics of Decision - Unfolding the design process within a framework of complexity and self- organization

Complexity-grounded paradigms and self-organization based strategies promise enormous potential when channeled in a design process, but their current stage of development (while delivering groundbreaking results in recent years) hasn't significantly impacted yet the widespread architectural practice. Still, the tendency (in the development of technology and society) is clearly towards an increase in complexity and distributed intelligence, henceforth it is of primary importance to adopt a design approach that allows the harnessing of such potential and convey it in the creation of outcomes that favor a richer and heterogeneous ecological entanglement. To tap this kind of potential in an open-ended process requires a design approach that redefines the distribution of control, choices and information throughout the whole process (including materials and fabrication processes).The paper explores the possibility of such design approach in the territory that links education and research through a series of Master Thesis developed at the University of Bologna and comparing them to other case studies developed worldwide.

Designing In Complex System interaction: Multi-Agent Based Systems for Early Design Decision Making

Proceedings of the 28th International Symposium on Automation and Robotics in Construction

This paper presents a novel framework for the integration and development of multi-agent based computation techniques to bridge the cyber/physical divide to enhance early stage design decision-making. Through the development of feedback loops of simulated occupancy behavior with design process, the framework presents a new paradigm for the integration of the building occupant and designer, and the building itself as agents for contributing to optimize building design including space use, visibility, adjacency, geometry and scale. The framework argues for the invention and value of linking of human agency, with computer agency and for incorporating emergent conditions and system interaction complexity in early design decision making. The paper focuses on an initial system design which focuses on transit users of multimodal facilities which brings feedback to the designer to optimize for a subset of identified design criteria. The framework shows that with the use of multi agent based simulations for incorporating more intelligently formalized occupant behavior, designers and engineers can ‘design in’ more realistic real world complexity and therefore generate design alternatives more rapidly while demonstrating more efficient spaces in terms of actual versus assumed complex natural and physical system interactions.

Naturalising the Design Process Autonomy and Interaction as the Core Features

This paper attempts to provide a naturalized description of the complex design process. The design process may be abstractly conceived as a future-creating activity that goes beyond "facticity" and creates visions of a desirable future among groups of agents. It requires the engagement of individual or groups of cognitive systems in purposeful and intentional (meaning-based) interactions with their environment and consequently with each other. It is argued in this paper that a design process should be interactive, future-anticipatory and open-ended. Furthermore, a framework to explain and support the design process should have in turn its basis in a framework of cognition. It is suggested that the design process should primarily be examined within an interactive framework of agency based on 2nd order cybernetic epistemology. Future-oriented anticipation requires functionality which can be thought of as future-directed activity; indeed all but the simplest functionalities require anticipation in order to be effective. Based on the fundamental notions of closure, self-reference and self-organisation, a cybernetically-inspired systems-theoretic notion of autonomy is proposed. This conception of autonomy is immediately related to the anticipative functionality of the cognitive system, which constructs emergent representations while it interactively participates in a design process.

Developing a symbiotic relationship between the designer and the technology employed in the generative evolution of an unforeseen design from a tangibly large volume of possibilities

2004

This report covers the development of a generative design system to encourage a symbioticrelationship between the technology employed and the human design team. To emphasisethe importance of the relationship, the technology will be a Playstation2, a technologicalmedium we are all aware of but this alternative use will help us to think of the technologyas technology.It is an attempt to evolve a complex design from a simple starting point, a portion of essential data to be peppered with human emotive response and abstractive ability. Thehope is that this will bridge the gaps, that current technology dominant generative design,outlined in Manuel Delanda's essay, suffers from in the generative design process.The first iterations of the generative design will be developed on the PC and those multipleiterations will be tested by the PS2 users. In the event of a successful iteration thefollowing iterations will gain complexity whilst retaining the structure of their parents. Ontheir failure the PC will try new mutated iterations at the previous level of complexity.The relationship starts to kick in as the user realises that they are trying to generatecomplexity - an organism that has the instinct to shelter and grow, which is later putforward to be the instinctive driver of successful generative architecture. The result of thismodel will hopefully enable the human designer to gain a heightened awareness of theirown design process, which in this context should promote a discussion about the role of smart technologies in the design process

An Agentic Account of Design Intentionality in Computational Architecture / Hesaplamalı mimarlıkta tasarım yönelimselliğine aracılık kavramı üzerinden bir bakış

2018

This thesis aims at understanding alterations in the conceptualization of design intentionality in relation to technological advances that bring new synthetic configurations to the world of design. The concept of intentionality used to be defined as central to human consciousness hence design intention regarded as exclusive to the human mind. The contemporary technological/ontological condition seems to displace this conceptualization of design intentionality sustained in conventional design processes, to think of design intentionality as embedded within computational agents through continuous feedbacks from designers, and reciprocally, designers’ intentionality is altered and expanded as a reflection of the emergent outputs from the computational world. Computational processes and their objects of design exhibiting the ‘emergent’, ‘unpredictable’ qualities are then expected to become accessible to the human mind by the formation of nested processes of interchanges between designers...