Generative Design

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.

Good examples of generative design are hard to come by – because there aren’t many, especially, in architecture. What is often claimed as generative design usually turns out to be designer-driven design. This is perhaps, due to the late discovery of parametric history based design by architects and perhaps the failure of design academics to define Generative Design.

An interesting example of generative design is presented by Nate Holland at the ACADIA conference as part of his research. Nate is indeed practicing generative design as his work process exploits the computers generate and  search capability  in exploring of design possibilities at the two vertical extremes of the building: Firstly, at ground floor to locate the best shop location and then at  the top levels to orient the towers according to the best views.

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Generative Design – that is, computers generating design – is yet to happen. It is currently confined in its computational form to the confines of reasearch labs. it has been there for some time. When it  gets out to the real world,  it faces two real challenges. One is the setting up of generative schemes and the other is the selection process which needs to analyse the merits of  thousands of designs.  The CAD system in which designs are generated plays a critical role in both these.

Many may not realize that Design – is a relatively new word (appearing in the English language only after the 16th century) when the art of conception and execution took separate professional paths. Before that, there were only artificers – folk, who just built stuff.

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A heavenly perspective ?

The “Design of Design “ –  is a rare book on design. It is an attempt at a heavenly re-marriage, between the theory of design and the practice of design –  that have long been divorced on earth. There is still hope in heaven, as earthly boundaries and practices do not matter from such an elevated perspective. Wonder if you noticed the church in his cover ? May he be blessed.

From such heights he is allowed to discuss computer architecture and building architecture in same breath.

Design education does more harm than good

You may have met in the corridors of engineering department, professors who specialize in design. Their main mission and obsession is to take the “irrationality” out of design, often by developing processes and diagrams that engineers are happy to digest. It makes their world safe cosy and predictable. But not for Brooks…

“One obvious injury of accepting the Rational Model is that we miss-educate our successors“.

Now, I wonder if academics could be accused of a greater crime?

They don’t like his book

It’s obvious why. They say, that he is saying nothing new. They are quite right. Prof.Brooks is saying nothing new. Nothing new at all. But what he says people are reading. His previous book : The Mythical Man Month: Essays on Software Engineering  – published in 1975 still sells 10,000 copies a year. Perhaps they find it useful ?

Academics on the other hand are paid to push the boundary of knowledge. But the problem of this academic pushing is that no one except themselves seems to know where they are pushing it. Only other academics are qualified to recognize that it is being pushed in the right direction.

But Fred has street cred

Fred fathered the field of computer architecture, well before most of us were born. His breath and depth of knowledge and experience in design is beyond doubt of great value to those who practice design. This book is a result of a life time of experience and reflection. In his own worlds…

“Its time for mature reaction”

His book is just that. It is indeed a mature reaction.  He brings to the fore the fallacy of rationalizing design. He puts the designer in the driving seat. Design he says, is about the designer and the process of design is best charted by designer who often has to fight tooth and nail to maintain what he calls “conceptual clarity” – which he vests with critical importance. He recognizes emergence (though he does not cal lit as such) playing a critical role in design. He emphasizes the obvious. That design is a co-evolutionary problem, where the problem and solutions need to co-evolve in a creative environment.

His examples in architecture are tepid. His house looks like a house, even thought is near the beach (and not like a skinned fish). Ghery would certainly not be impressed. He seems not be clued-in into the new developments in computational design – which are beginning to bear fruit. Perhaps he is still reacting to the older generation of academics who in vain attempted to bring rational process onto deign. But most importantly he is not saying anything new.

Prof Brooks has got most of the important things about design right

These important things are not new – because they are fundamental issues. Prof Brooks should be credited for bringing them out with such great clarity as a collection of essays that are easy to read. They are amongst the best writings on the theory of design – because he destroys the rest of them.

We now have less to read

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Early CAD was about replicating the drafting board. Latter it become a visualisation tool. But engineers have been using it for long as an analytical tool. Now, it’s all coming together in a potent way.

Vasari is a surprise – because it is well conceived for modeling designs (instead of drawing) in an integrated analytical environment. But this is something that could have been done two decades ago. All the bits and pieces were available then. But corporations tend to take their time for theirs is a captive audience, that first have to be stepped out of the drawing board and gently into 3D from 2D.

Most software companies that I know are driven by users requested  features added on top of each other. They   lack   what Clinton called the  “ The Vision Thing ” .  But that’s dangerous, because you can get it wrong. Autodesk now seems to have vision. It has proven that vision can be acquired. The acquisition of companies and people seem to have given Autodesk now a distinct advantage in structuring architectural design tool in a way that they should be.

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Engineers are schooled differently from architects. They think differently.  Often, the one that deals with  plumbing will know little about  wiring : they are specialists. Engineers work by setting tasks and goals. They achieve them efficiently – often at the lowest cost and effort. Architects in comparison are messy, but often get paid more by the client. They get to tell the engineers what they want done, often after they have conceived the design, and using their own private creative processes that are often driven by experience, ego and branding considerations moulded into a design philosophy – that separates them from lesser architects.

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Structural form finding is not new. It has been practiced for centuries by sensible builders who sought to optimize the use of materials and push possibilities to new limits. Roman arches, aqueducts and gothic cathedrals testify to this with their grace, efficiency and elegance. In ancient architecture, great structural design accompanied great design: one shaped the other. But things took a different turn when the profession of engineering emerged,  taking away from architecture critical knowledge about the shaping of form.

Joris Laarman's Design

Early Victorian engineers however, created sensible and elegant forms – out of simple equations. But soon the fine art of structural design  was obfuscated  with the language of mathematical analysis,  landing it securely in the hands of engineers.  Continuing developments  in material strength, fabrication technologies and lately computer aided analysis bought back control into to the hands of architects, who had by then  lost the knowledge of structural design, which was replaced by curricula and code accompanied by jubilation of what can be now done.  They are heavily reliant  on the capabilities of a few engineering firms that can  make any ridiculous shape stand up, at massive expense and some risk to. So, we are now in show business and the challenge then is to drive this show with structural sense.

Feri Otto manged to succeed in this. So did Buckminster Fuller. Calatrava’s  work goes  in this direction, but its  exuberant thins out its structural efficiency. Other great works of structural art remain hidden in cars and landing gears un known of and unheard of operating silently and efficiently. We get only excited when it is intentionally elevated into design, especially when its forms are pleasing. Joris Laarman is working in this direction taking a leaf out of Antonio Guadi’s book. Guadi was a fanatic form finder. When we found that forces from his towers hit the ground at an angle, he tilted his columns accordingly. It’s refreshing to see, once again,  new work that is inspired by the flow of forces made possible by advances in rapid prototyping technologies.  These forms may not be the easiest to fabricate but they point in the right direction – that the flow of force has generative capabilities. It is this very capacity, that shapes our bones, our muscles and all things that are living.

Such designs bring to our attention the fundamental contradiction between Euclidean forms (still thought by many to be ideal) and optimal natural forms which are phenomenally more efficient. It exposes the irrationality of the rational movement in architecture that made us believe in the efficiencies of inefficient form. So, once again, nature presents us an opportunity to learn how its structural genius may  result in pleasing forms.

An inspiring presentation by Neri Oxman with some break through thinking – on what design processes should be. Inspired of course by Nature, and enabled by new material manufacturing processes.

She asks some very important questions:

What is the origin of form ? How do we invent form?  Where do we begin ?

Instead of asking what the object wants to be, she asks what does the material want to be ? This was the same question that drove the visionary designers like Bukminister Fuller, Lugi Nevri , Felix Candela and Frie Otto - the form finders of a previous generation.  Their material inspired forms stand in sharp contrast to the tortured architectural forms that we see today, which  are often painfully at odds with the nature of the materials and processes that they are built out of. However, they are “forms that are now possible” . Despite esoteric claims, they are often massively inefficient in all forms of performance, except in advertising their own presence. Neri  is making a clear argument for material driven design, where forms are computationally derived by incorporating engineering rules into generative scheme itself.

The other important point she makes is that

Nature authors not forms but processes… recipes that mix material and environment together, and from these mixtures form emerge.

She calls this Computationally Enabled Form Finding.  Her PhD at MIT is about bringing together material properties and environmental constraints and properties, mixing them together  generate form out of it. She argues  for designing systems that incorporate performance criteria.

She reinforces some ideas in this blog about constraints. But she relegates designers to “editor of constraints”. The designer she says    ” becomes a Gardener,  an experimenter that generates lots of options, eliminating and working towards environmental fitness”. She recommends that design should start from analysis  from through material properties. Nature she points out is a grand material engineer. It knows how to organize matter and it designs multi-functionality. She has applied some of these lessons in her own work. She points out that our bones  are doing the analysis, modeling and the fabrication simultaneously as part of the  same process. But in design, we don’t. We separate analysis, modeling and fabrication.

I am not sure how designers are going to react to her thoughts. They probably will ignore her. We should not. In Neri’s thinking,  there are some critical gems that address the quest of environmentalist (and other types of sensible people) : how to design super efficiently, with consideration to materials,  enabled by new fabrication processes and  computational capacities that are available today with due consideration to the limitations of the world we live in.

Computer aided design has come a very long way. Its initial purpose was to automate the drawing board.  It was stuck for long in the paradigm that Henry  Ford best described :  “If I had asked my customers what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse.“

It took a very long time for many to realize that a computational machine is capable of more.

That it is able to create 3D views, render  and  analyze them. It took even longer for many to realize that you can actually design in 3D. After many decades,  CAD companies that wrote drawing applications are now writing Design applications making much better use of computational capacity to support design instead of drawing. In the midst of this change is greater change that is brewing.

The use of Building Information Management (BIM) is sky rocketing as you can see it from the job trends.

Most people in the CAD world have come to the realization that design is about processing large amounts of information collaboratively. The advantages are becoming rapidly evident. Industry is driven by efficiency. Work processes adjust accordingly.

So what will be the future for Computer Aided Design ? This is my guess:

1. It will move to the cloud
2. CAD applications will be free
3. Component Manufactures will provide component information in an interactive format
4. Generative Design will power design creation from concept to maturity
5. Designs will be based on open frame works
6. Contractual bids, engineering and other services will be sourced online
7. Design will be about design – the rest will be taken care of

A refreshing  projects using generative design where the process of design and fabrication is documented and available.  Too many projects make unsubstantiated claims on the use of generative design -  which could mean anything from exploring a few options in 3D CAD to tweaking some design parameters. A complete video describing the whole process of design and building and the genetic stair  is available in face book.

This is an interesting undertaking by Caliper Studio.  It’s interesting for two reasons. One is that it takes into account the manufacturing limits as part of the generative design problem. Secondly its uses simple printing technology to achieve complex manufacturing. Very complex drilling and cutting patterns were created by gluing a printed sheet on metal tubes.

It’s interesting to learn how complex structures can be built with basic non-CNC manufacturing processes. Smart Geometry is running a workshop on this topic ” Hi Tech Design – Low Tech Construction” this year.

More pictures  are available in their flicker page.