Advanced design software allows designers to rapidly create huge numbers of design variations. However, these variations do not incorporate material and manufacturing limits, which are typically considered much later during the process of design documentation. By creating a method, which incorporates these limits during the design process, we avoid iterations that would be difficult, costly, or impossible to build. This method allows designers to work in a configured design space, which focuses on feasible designs.

Despite exponential developments in technological manufacturing and computational design, the act of drawing still plays a role as the central vehicle for speculation in architectural practice. Historically, drawing has been tied to not only advances in architecture, but advances in technology and culture as well. From Alberti’s Lineaments, to da Vinci’s Machines, to Thomas More’s visions of Utopia, Laugier’s Primitive Hut, Ledoux’s City of Chaux, Boullee’s Cenotaph to Newton, and Hugh Ferriss’ visions of New York, innovation in the field of architecture over the last 600 years has inextricably been tied to speculative drawing.

DesComp Thesis Completed by Christian Sjoberg (2017)- Presented at ACADIA 2017

Numerous systems have been developed to display large collections of data for urban contexts; however, most have focused on layer- ing of single dimensions of data and manual calculations to un- derstand relationships within the urban environment. Furthermore, these systems often limit the user’s perspectives on the data, thereby diminishing the user’s spatial understanding of the viewing region. In this paper, we introduce a highly interactive urban visualization tool that provides intuitive understanding of the urban data.

Kevin Lynch’s work on urban legibility has taken on new importance as the delivery of information about cities has shifted largely to mobile computing devices. This study extends his work with the aim of quantifying the number and type of elements that constitute a competent cognitive map of a city. We conducted a user study of 109 student sketch maps of Chicago that test the frequency and nature of the elements identified by Lynch (path, edge, district, node and landmark), their interrelationship and the effect of gender, prior experience and scale.

It would seem that since humanity first began building settlements and creating tools that it has been marching tenaciously upon a path of progress. So intertwined have been the actions of humanity with advancement, that the ages themselves take title from the character of human creation. The Stone Age, The Bronze Age, and the Iron Age are each characterized according to the level of sophistication reached by humans through progress. Steady progress through Antiquity and the Middle Ages inevitably lead to a critical mass of knowledge, which manifested itself as the Enlightenment and ultimately the Industrial Revolution.

The expanding role of computational models in the process of design is producing exponential growth in parameter spaces. As designers, we must create and implement new methods for searching these parameter spaces, considering not only quantitative optimization metrics but also qualitative features. This paper proposes a methodology that leverages the pa ern modeling properties of artificial neural networks to capture designers’ inexplicit selection criteria and create user-selection-based fitness functions for a genetic solver. Through emulation of learned selection patterns, fitness functions based on trained networks provide a method for qualitative evaluation of designs in the context of a given population. The application of genetic solvers for the genera on of new populations based on the trained network selections creates emergent high-density clusters in the parameter space, allowing for the identification of solutions that satisfy the designer’s inexplicit criteria. The results of an initial user study show that even with small numbers of training objects, a search tool with this configuration can begin to emulate the design criteria of the user who trained it.

This paper describes the connections between computation- al thinking and digital craft, and proposes several ways that architectural education can cultivate better digital craft, specifically: motivating the use of computational strategies, encouraging a conceptual understanding of computing as a medium, teaching computer programming, and discussing digital ethics. For the most part, these subjects are not widely taught in architecture schools. However, moving forward, if the profession values good design, it must also value good digital craft, and ought to instill a way of working in the next generation of architects that makes the most of both the computer and the de- signer. Computational thinking provides a common foundation for defining and instilling this critical mindset and, therefore, deserves greater consideration within architectural pedagogy.

The building sector is now widely known to be one of the biggest energy consumers, carbon emitters, and creators of waste. Some architectural agendas for sustainability focus on energy efficiency of buildings that minimize their energy intake during their lifetime – through the use of more efficient mechanical systems or more insulative wall systems. The focus on efficiency is but one aspect or system of the building assembly, when compared to the effectiveness of the whole, which often leads to ad-hoc ecology and results in the all too familiar “law of unintended consequences” (Merton, 1936). As soon as adhesive is used to connect two materials, a piece of trash is created. If designers treat material as energy, and want to use energy responsibly, they can prolong the lifetime of building material by designing for disassembly. By changing the nature of the physical relationship between materials, buildings can be reconfigured and repurposed all the while keeping materials out of a landfill. The concept of design for disassembly is a recognizable goal of industrial design and manufacturing, but for Architecture it remains a novel approach. A classic example is Kieran Timberlake’s Loblolly House, which employed material assemblies “that are detailed for on-site assembly as well as future disassembly and redeployment” (Flat, Inc, 2008). The use of nearly ubiquitous digital manufacturing tools helps designers create highly functional, precise and effective methods of connection which afford a building to be taken apart and reused or reassembled into alternative configurations or for alternative uses. This book will survey alternative energy strategies made available through joinery using digital manufacturing and design methods, and will evaluate these strategies in their ability to create diassemblable materials which therefore use less energy – or minimize the entropy of energy over the life-cycle of the material.

Through an investigation into material phenomenology and digital fabrication a codependent relationship evolved revealing the possibilities that these new technologies can having with respect integrating the architect more fully in the construction and fabrication of architecture. These studies used an digital and analog generative design process as an approach to reveal the characteristics and possibilities that lie within this relationship.