Nature does not design
Despite the significant interest we have in nature as a source of design inspiration, we do not adopt her design methods, except for genetic algorithm, developed by John Holland in 1975. This however is an optimization method and not a design method. Her design solutions however, have begun to inspire the design of new products through the emerging field of bio-mimicry. But these are based her vast repertoire of design solutions and not based her design methods.
Even though nature’s design processes are now known - they remain purely as a source of inspiration. Why then are her methods of no practical use to designers? I am beginning to suspect some fundamental problems. Here are some of them :
Natures has no intentions
Design seems to be by definition a human driven process. Humans have intentions. Nature does not. God on the other hand may have intentions, but if he cared about nature he would not have created us. The book the “Selfish Gene” (published 30 years ago) illustrates the claim that it is not life forms but bits of code that compete for self replication – which could then be seen to be the only intention if there was any. So nature is into code play. Disturbingly, nature’s design processes seem autonomous and direction less, and worse it is driven entirely by the selfish propagational interest of bits of code – that hitch hike on living forms.
This model of autonomous and mutually dependent conglomerate of code competing with each other to propagate seems to be an impractical and uninspiring model for designers to adopt. More depressing is the fact that the resulting biomass that we so admire is only a packaging for the all important the bits of code to propagate itself. Once the packaging is gone past its usefulness and makes errors in replicating the code, it is dully discarded (suffering death) while the code moves on to younger packages that can do a better job at replication and propagation. The deviousness of this strategy is nauseating. Our body bags are nothing but code replication devises. Whats even more annoying is the fact that the intentions of these bits of code seem to be independent of the bodies that carry it. A good part of design history remains in great awe of this package and it is hard to think that the very brain with which we understand this i,s just a small part of this package. I am not sure if we will every come to terms with this.
It is only recently we have come to learn its part in the greater scheme of things. Biologist have begun to see life forms as a less important byproduct of natures obsessive code play. I sometimes wonder for what end is this play ? Perhaps it is this code play that we mistake for life. There seems to be only one motivation for this code play - more code play.
Nature does not “design”
The word design was first used in the 17th century to differentiate human creational efforts from divine creations. The word, therefore, is used to signify a human activity driven by human intentions. Design is also an activity that precedes fabrication. Nature does not have this contemplative step. It fabricates without contemplation with no understanding of the outcome. Not only that, each cell does not know what the other cell has in store. Despite that, it builds with impressive coordination according to pre-orchestrated schemes – that we may be tempted to call design. But design in nature is entirely through the modification of processes. We cannot call nature’s process “design”, because it is a “build and see ” approch and according to Dawkins – a blind one ( worth reading the The blind Watchmaker)
Bits of code and populations
Life forms are built out of collections of code. Some of this code is shared by other life forms. New life forms are created by new combinations of codes. Hence the core design process – operates at a gene level and not at an organism level. Nature in its wisdom has no concept of life forms – except as facilities for the propagation of genes. In that too, it seems to work at a population level and not at an organism level. Nature’s solutions for a biological proposition should be seen as a population of propositions, rather than a singular solution. The concept of “ideal design” seems to be alien to it. It seems to value diversity.
Life is a design contest
Nature, on the other hand, is rigorous in its evaluation of designs. It tests them against the cruelty of life, in competitions for food mates and survival. Organisms have to pass a series of tests. Could these tests be considered as a replacement for design intentions? In the case of mammals, this could be a combination of growth, survival, reproductive success and in the case of plants, growth and survival and propagation. They seem to be more like a series of filters through which the collections of genes need to swim rather than a pre-set direction. We can observe that in every one of these aspects, a wide range of strategies that bring about success. So it can be argued that intentions are absent other than continual reproductive success; continual because they need to keep passing the life test. Life forms seem to enjoy great freedom in developing their own strategies and solutions. The biomass – that we call life happens to be of admirable design quality. So design in nature is about the continuous reshuffling and introduction of new types of code that makes the bodies that carry it to replicate the same.
So, Nature is clearly doing something else
Should we not stop calling it design ?
Conversation with : Prof. John Frazer
I vaguely remember reading his book which you may remember for its blinking led lights in its cover, which was fairly weird then for a book on architecture. It was a pleasure to hear him speak in the design conference in Nov. In such conferences there are often the established and known – their views are known and often they have nothing new to say.
Then you have the cutting edge folks – whose presentations sound like teenagers discussing sex, “I did that this and that, and then…..” listened intensively by an equality excitable audience ready to applaud the weirdity of the resulting forms. Generative design, has sadly become the means through which such hi-octane forms are effortlessly created, leaving little room for restfulness or reflection. Hey, for the younger folks who are reading this, just want to say that this may be an age thing.
As thoughtless forms take over the screen and as I hear newly spun design philosophies blurted out with the accompaniment of architectonic lullabies thankfully provided me the perfect time for a conference catnap, only to be woken up by Prof.Frazer. His lecture was delivered with the thumping energy of a British steam engine. You can see him live in an AA lecture. The things he had to say were of interest to me and perhaps I thought, to the readers of this blog. So I approached him after his lecture and kindly, he agreed to be interviewed.
The long standing layout problem
It is refreshing to see promising research and useful methods emerging from lesser known quarters. Despite decades of academic research the “layout problem” as it is called, is till today solved by intelligent guess work.
Christian Derix, director of Aedas R&D Computation Design Research (CDR) group seem to be close to cracking a rather long standing problem. A problem that obsessed early design researchers from the end of world war 2. Architects returning from the war seem to have been keen to shake out the “irrational: image of their professions. Their engineering colleagues got back to peaceful production and were focusing their efforts on improving production and making it efficient. 50~30% of production costs are attributed to what is called transport cost, or the cost of moving material from one place to the other.
What is missing ?
I just returned from ”Design the Dynamic” design conference in Melbourne and would like to share what I heard, felt and learned. This conference was based on Design and Computational Fluid Dynamics, often referred to as CFD. It was preceded by a 4 day workshop in which impressive progress was made by students of RMIT in prototyping rigging up and analyzing an interesting range of design concepts.
The symposium on the last day had the usual cocktail of presentations from practicing architects showcasing their current work and work processes, academics discussing issues that are more relevant to the academic world as it struggles to connect to the real world. Also present were those who connected random thoughts to random words illustrated with equally random images. Noticeably absent were the representatives CAD companies. Perhaps because they are convinced of the irrelevance of the rest in a game that is now defined, led and played entirely by them. While some CAD companies rely on strategies that depend on the capabilities that they have developed or acquired, some rely more on the energies and abilities the vibrant communities that they have nurtured around their offerings.
The symposium however was interesting and here is what I learned from it.
Winds can shape form
Streamline of wind flow and pressure
Not only are the dunes of deserts but buildings too can be shaped by winds. Wind can be a generative force. An interesting presentation by engineer Peter Felicetti based on collaborative research with Prof. Mike Xie and JIWu Tang showed how twisted shapes can drive wind upwards and provide an aerodynamic lift that works against gravity. In tall buildings, even though wind forces are significant they are only a fraction of gravitational forces, still they can help shape them.
Rough & inaccurate tools are still very useful
The results of the 4 day projects that preceded the conference were also presented. Results from various CFD tools of two extreme kinds were compared. Whiles the tools like Vasari reduced the complexity, they were discovered to be less accurate than more advanced analytical tools such as ANSYS that are usually operated by experts. However, tools like Vasari were found to be useful despite their limitations and misuse by the “Jonny English of CFD” as a presenter described himself, because they can be fixed quickly with a bit of timely expert input. It also seemed that the loss of accuracy was mainly due to Johnny English effect . Those with better understanding of CFD could drastically improve the results over Jonny using the very same tools. So this way, Johnny is in the game. He has his role and the experts have thiers too.
Consumer Creativity
Forget Steve Jobs, forget those product designers out there, forget all those product managers. Consumers are at the heart of new product creation and innovation according to findings of an extensive study made by Prof. Von Hippel. “The Age of Consumer Innovator “ in the MIT Sloan management Review is worth a read.
National level studies were carried out in the US,UK & Japan resulting in the finding that “ estimated amount U.K. consumers as a group spend on consumer product development is actually more (144%) than what all commercial enterprises as a group spend on consumer product R&D in the U.K.” places consumer innovation as something that business cannot afford to ignore. The study however concentrates on developed countries with strong industrial and R&D focus.
What about the rest ?
A passing a comment is made of the rest ” Probably much less money is spent by individual consumer-innovators in lower income countries.” Perhaps so. But necessity is the mother of invention and the quality of invention does not necessary correlate to investment – it appears to correlate to the lack of it.
Hands free set. Who needs blue tooth ?
Whatz the clouds got to do with it ?
The cloud brings together the possibility of massive computational resources and connectivity in an unprecedented scale across a wide range of business, educational and entertainment activities.
Are the Architects ready for the cloud?
The answer is ” No”. But, will they get there? ” Yes”. Most likely, in the same wrong way they adopted CAD – to replicate the drawing board with CRT screens – without consideration to the true potential of computers. This was a big jump for many architects. It happened only because they were assured that the Cathode Ray Tube (CRT) was better than the drawing board. Companies such as Amazon, Microsoft, Apple and Autodesk are all now busy building the rail roads in the kingdom in heaven – in which platforms of great promise will dominate the next era of human dependence on computation. So, everyone will get there for sure.
But what will design be in the cloud ?
I believe that the cloud will initially be used in the same way that computers were used to replace existing PC based practices. PC bound CAD systems will soon be operating on cloud platforms. Speed and connectivity bonuses are good enough to lure most CAD dependent designers. But once they are all there, it is likely to transform the practice of design in way that it was transformed by the PC/CAD revolution. But then, without them realizing it, the clocks will be turned back on them. Design processes will go back a few billion years – to where design began.
Design will be – as in nature
Nature in itself is a massive computational environment that has evolved over billions of years. Its key virtues of building complexity based on shared code and ability to explore possibilities through random exploration using highly evolved strategies and methods will come to dominate the art of design – orchestrated by human designers, the way humans have harvested the potential of natures design capability to turn grass in to wheat and rice and wolf into dog; primarily by manipulating a highly evolved refined and structured design processes.
Design as it is now
Before we consider the lofty heights that clouds can take us to, let’s review where we are with CAD now. The turbocharged drafting machines now connected to data-bases powered graphically by games technologies have got us quite far. A diverse set of capabilities and professional work practices – are now slowly coming together; but mostly at the back-end of the design process. But here it is too late, as all the important designs are already made and opportunities to make significant improvements are limited. It is known that more than 80% of decisions and commitments are made in the early stages of the design process (shaded in green) where now computers play a very limited role.
The codification and comodification of CAD
Most CAD packages now handle the drudgery of 3D manipulation fairly well. The dark regions shown – is dominated by code that reduce design labor ( most CAD companies have similar capabilities in this area). The push now, is into early stage design, where significant improvements can be made. Software like Grasshopper and platforms like Vasari are now extending the reach of CAD into early stage design. Further up stream is generative design.
What the clouds mean for generative design?
It is like asking what gasoline means for your car? Generative design can drink it all – all the computational capabilities that the cloud can provide. It will soon be possible to roll apparently dumb, random and computationally intensive approaches that nature has chosen in its great wisdom. Hopefully, it will be based on an open and shared genetic infrastructure – so that knowledge generated will not be lost but be shared and built upon.
The fundamental change will be the ability to consider multiple possibilities in virtual environments. In sharp contrast to the singular and somewhat perturbed linear approach mastered by designers on account of their limited mental processing capabilities. The design processes now used by designers are based on the limits of the processing capability of the human mind and its ability to consider only a large but limited number of possibilities. Kasparov is no longer the champion of chess.
The maturing of many CAD technologies has already greatly reduced the human labor in taking early stage concepts to reality that is close to real, making it possible to consider multiple possibilities of great maturity – instead of dumping them at the end of a doodling process as part of an ancient design ritual.
Post Parametric Revolution
Much of architectural design is now about tweaking parameters. While we are yet to master the fine art of parametric design, there is much excitement about it. Perhaps too much of it. Thanks to it, most architects are now aware of the benefits of parametric design – where modification can be easily made and (parametric) variations easily explored.
Parametric play is now enjoying its day in the sun.
While parametric approaches to design are being formulated and built into work processes, something even more interesting is beginning to happen. Architectural geometry is now going through a post parametric revolution.
For a long time in architectural history, proportioning played a pivotal role. Proportioning is the precursor to parametric play, where the overall structure of the design is formed and fixed while its proportions are altered to find the most desirable form. It is powerful and useful. But limited in its capacity to create diverse forms in terms of topology. CAD packages could easily implement this, because they are driven by parameters anyway. But there was something else about CAD packages that remain hidden – perhaps for a bit too long. But remember, in the early days it was difficult to get designer to use CAD, you had to give them the impression that nothing had really changed and that they can now do in a screen what they used to do with pencil and paper.
After CAD, all geometric forms were inevitably authored by programs. But these programs were hidden. CAD companies went out-of-the-way to provide a veneer that kept the designers minds in the era of paper and pen. Perhaps, they did not guess that they will grow out of it. Perhaps this guess was right, particularly in Industrial design. But it is not so in architecture.
No more shame
The new generation of cutting edge designers now seem comfortable with code. Add-ons like grasshopper have made it much more easy to author code. Code has made it easy to create complex and repetitive forms. These forms can even compete with spaghetti in terms of geometric complexity.
Most cool designs are now authored by scripts. We are now at the end of simple parametric play. As the programmatic nature behind the construction of the geometry is exposed, it is natural that designers will start re-arranging bits of scripts to create more interesting forms. This is beginning to happen.
Are we like bacteria now ?
Bacteria under observation
We are now reaching a new threshold in computation and sensor technology – where what we do, how we behave and to some extent how we feel can be computationally modeled. Your credit card company and Google have been doing this for some time. They can predict many aspects of your behavior as accurately as a biologist can predict the reproductive behavior of bacteria. The acceptance of our collective behavior is difficult for us humans, as we wish not to degrades our status to that of bacterial blobs. While we live in denial, we allow street cameras, credit card companies and Google to monitor the most intimate aspects of our life. Monitoring our behavior within buildings in comparison is much much easier.
We behave within buildings in predictable ways. Buildings make us behave in predictable ways. Perhaps this is the purpose of buildings. If we then invert the concept, and model our behavior, instead of just monitoring, it may open interesting possibilities. We will be able to design our behavior in an entirely different way. We may be able to induce certain behavior and from it satisfaction of the kind we desire.
Daniel Hambleton is onto something. The attempt to yoke experience and form is likely to re-shape the future of architectural design. Crowd simulation seems to be a mature technology now. ( another video on of crowd simulation).
End of the road for the turbo-charged drawing board?
End of the road ?
We are now amidst an interesting change. The era of automating the drawing board seems to be drawing to a close. The architecture of today is increasingly difficult to draw with straight lines. There are many repeated components of various sizes. Fabrication companies are now able to crank out shapes that were not possible before. The cost of customisation is also continuously reducing. The virtues of straight line – sung by the modernist architects inspired by an ancient geometric legend, seem to interest nobody. It has now lost its rationality and more importantly its appeal.
The rise of curvitecture
What’s interesting about design are trends. Because each trend destroys a previous trend and with it, the tools designed to author it. Curvitecture is primarily a result of reaction to an Euclidean trend that swept the world – as the “modern movement” which imbued mass manufactured forms with aesthetic and rational qualities. Its overwhelming success, the mass confusion of what is considered bio and curved and overriding attention seeking goal of architects has helped fuel a trends that have now wrecked the Euclidean sense of Geometry. It s forms, rationality and aesthic will soon be buried in architectural history.
Anything is possible now
Being creative is about moving to the edge – especially the edge that is being extended by new technology, engineering and manufacturing capabilities. Architects entertain the attention deprived world by authoring unseen shapes of great complexity – which mostly do not relate to increase in performance despite their significant cost.Being and looking “bio” is certainly a justification that works, because now being bio is being good and also being efficient. So there is a case for funny forms.
Why programs need to draw
It is impossible to draw a rat’s nest on AutoCAD. But it is possible to do so using programs that can handle the geometry of individual elements. Each element has common attributes that can easily be created by programs. Incidentally, we were built that way. We are a result of genetic constructional programs that told our cells how to and when to design themselves. Drafting board-inspired CAD packages are unable to handle the complexity of the kinds of shapes that are now being authored. A reassuring reaction is that only a small portion of building are funny shaped and the bulk of what is built can still be drawn with a drafting board.
In the name of efficiency
The era of the turbo-charged drawing board is not to end too soon perhaps the way drawing boards themselves vanished from design practices. To prevent is pre-mature demise, a late but smart decision has been made to marry it to databases so that it can better handle the grunt work of design. This strategy seem to be working. BIM is breathing new life into old CAD. It is bringing obvious ways of working with computers (long obvious to companies like archiCAD) into mainstream use.The assocaited cost savings makes it an easy sell. The advantages are significant and architects are too busy either singing its praises or getting on board. But the age gap is catching up with them; because the next generation designs very differently.
Cheap, smart, socially authored software
The design schools of today will give you a better glimpse of the future of CAD in architecture. They are now skewed towards scripting based tools – where designs are more transparently authored by programs. In the case of grasshopper, these programs are disguised as drag and drop boxes – giving late teenagers the thrill of connecting them with wires. The network around the grasshopper community is a global collaborative R&D team that is continuously developing new ways of authoring design. Many of them can program too.
The turbo-charged drawing boards, though now newly married to databases, and renamed BIM certainly is a late stage marriage of significance to the those who are in mature practices, whose choice of CAD is skewed towards realizing designs . But those who wish to use CAD as a creative tool need to look elsewhere.
Digital Sketching
Computers are great for finalizing designs and lousy at developing them. In the the early stages, the design is under evolution. Early stage design exploration mostly happens in the designers mind inspired by incomplete doodles. CAD is cumbersome. It cannot provide the magic fluidity of the pen,pencil and mind combo. But this seems to be changing. Thanks to tools like grasshopper it is now possible to rapidly sketch designs and consider variations collaboratively. This is now beginning to take hold in architecture. Thornton Tomasetti -presents some excellent examples;
Interestingly, the work processes of this engineering firm was inspired by seeing students use grasshopper in schools of architecture. Grasshopper is now reaping the benefits of its open approach (the ease of interfacability for pumping data in out to various analytical packages) and large and dedicated user community. So architects and engineers can now share same early stage geometric data and build on it.
Tools like grasshopper are now making the very same transition that open sourced software made. People asked the same questions. Would you run a commercial application on free software ? Whom can I call if I have a problem ? This stuff is good to play around, but would you build a building worth millions of $ with it ? The answerer is yes, and it is happening now.
Once engineers start using it, it will acquire an aura of reliability and respectability (despite its insect name). When engineers ask architects to provide them with grasshopper models architects will assume that this is serious stuff – this is good not only for sketching but also for building stuff, analysing stuff and further along the line for contracting stuff. But there is nothing to get excited, it’s all still parametric play (mistakenly called generative design).
I can see these engineers highly amused by what they can now do with the tools they picked up last year. They are yet to see what is to come. Such cleverness will soon be commonplace. Cleverness will soon be about using the cleverness of computers. Getting computers to explore, instead of them driving the designs . But we must thank these folks because they have taken the first step in demonstrating what can now be done.
