Cumincad : CUMINCAD Papers : Search Results

CumInCAD is a Cumulative Index about publications in Computer Aided Architectural Design
supported by the sibling associations ACADIA, CAADRIA, eCAADe, SIGraDi, ASCAAD and CAAD futures

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_id	5d77
id	5d77
authors	Adriane Borda; Neusa Félix; Janice de Freitas Pires; Noélia de Moraes Aguirre.
year	2008
title	MODELAGEM GEOMÉTRICA NOS ESTÁGIOS INICIAIS DE APRENDIZAGEM DA PRÁTICA PROJETUAL EM ARQUITETURA. GEOMETRIC MODELING IN THE EARLY STAGES OF LEARNING PRACTICE ARCHITECTURAL DESIGN.
source	12th Iberoamerican Congress of Digital Graphics, SIGRADI, 2008, Havana. SIGRADI, Proceedings of the 12th Iberoamerican Congress of Digital Graphics.. Havana : Ministerio de Educacion Superior, 2008. p. 434-438.
summary	This work invests on delimitation of a Geometric Modeling study program directed to students at the initial stages of Architecture. It is considered that the studies promote a qualified control of the form based on recognition of parameters which define it, moreover it also allows the enlargement of the students geometric vocabulary, important to the architectural design activities. In this way, the program advances on the appropriation of new concepts which surround the investigations on architectural design processes, such as the concept of shape grammar. Observing analysis and architectural composition practices based on such concept, contents of geometric modeling which are already being used in the context of post-graduation are identified to be transposed to the graduation context, along with the initial teaching practices of architectural design. The results refer to making the didactic material available, these materials have the objective of building references for the development of design practice which explore the reflection about the processes of creation and composition of architectural form in their geometric aspects.
keywords	Architecture, Geometric Modeling, Shape grammar, Teaching/Learning
series	SIGRADI
type	normal paper
email
last changed	2016/03/10 09:47

_id	sigradi2008_080
id	sigradi2008_080
authors	Andrés, Roberto
year	2008
title	Hybrid Art > Synthesized Architecture
source	SIGraDi 2008 - [Proceedings of the 12th Iberoamerican Congress of Digital Graphics] La Habana - Cuba 1-5 December 2008
summary	This paper investigates possible intersections between some contemporary artistic modalities and architectural practice. At first, it describes and discusses different uses of art in architectural history. Through the analyzes of Le Corbusier’s artistic and architectural practices, it observes the limits of looking at art as only ‘inspiration’ for architectural form and points to the necessity of surpassing this formal approach. More than bringing pictorial ‘inspiration’, art, as a experimental field, can change our architectural procedures and approaches - a much richer and powerful addition to the development of architecture. It discusses then, the confluence of architecture, information and communication technologies. Very commonly present in our contemporary life, not only on the making of architecture – computer drawings and modeling of extravagant buildings – nor in ‘automated rooms’ of the millionaire’s houses. Televisions, telephones and computers leave the walls of our houses “with as many holes as a Swiss cheese”, as Flusser has pointed. The architecture has historically manipulated the way people interact, but this interaction now has been greatly changed by new technologies. Since is inevitable to think the contemporary world without them, it is extreme urgent that architects start dealing with this whole universe in a creative way. Important changes in architecture occur after professionals start to research and experiment with different artistic medias, not limiting their visions to painting and sculpture. The main hypothesis of this paper is that the experiments with new media art can bring the field of architecture closer to information and communication technologies. This confluence can only take form when architects rise questions about technology based interaction and automation during their creative process, embodying these concepts into the architecture repertoire. An educational experience was conducted in 2007 at UFMG Architecture School, in Brazil, with the intention of this activity was to allow students to research creatively with both information technology and architecture. The students’ goal was to create site-specific interventions on the school building, using physical and digital devices. Finally, the paper contextualizes this experience with the discussion above exposed. Concluding with an exposition of the potentialities of some contemporary art modalities (specially the hybrid ones) in qualifying architectural practices.
keywords	Architecture; Information and Communication Technologies; Digital Art; Site Specific Art; Architectural Learning.
series	SIGRADI
email
last changed	2016/03/10 09:47

_id	sigradi2008_103
id	sigradi2008_103
authors	Baltazar, Ana Paula; Maria Lucia Malard, Silke Kapp, Pedro Schultz
year	2008
title	From physical models to immersive collaborative environments: testing the best way for homeless people to visualise and negotiate spaces
source	SIGraDi 2008 - [Proceedings of the 12th Iberoamerican Congress of Digital Graphics] La Habana - Cuba 1-5 December 2008
summary	This paper describes an experiment to investigate the best way for lay people to use representation to visualise and negotiate space. It was motivated by our observations in workshops for digital inclusion in the context of a housing project for a homeless association. Computers were used to make it easier for the community to understand and change the spaces in real time. The first workshops proved that our approach was efficient as an exercise but not certainly effective concerning the understanding of spatial qualities. So we have designed an experiment to compare the usability of different media in participatory design processes. For that we have adapted the ‘Usability’ methodology, which is fully described in the paper. We started with three main questions. The first concerned the effectiveness of different media to represent spatial quality; the second concerned the best way for novices to approach space, whether by refurbishing a pre-existing space or by starting from the scratch; and the third concerned the effectiveness of negotiation by means of discourse and by means of or action. We also had two main hypothesis: one coming from research on digital environments and stereo visualisation, indicating that the more people feel immersed in the represented environment the more they are able to correlate it with physical space; and the other coming from our own observations in the participatory design workshops, in which the collective decision-making was manipulated by those people with more advanced communication skills who use their ability in an authoritative way regardless of the relevance of what they have to say. This paper describes the whole experiment, which was an exercise of spatial negotiation in 5 versions. In the first version we provided fixed digital views of a room in plan and axonometry; for another two versions we provided a physical model of the room in 1:10 scale, with some pieces of the existing furniture in different scales. This was done to check if people were just playing with a puzzle or actually grasping the correspondence between representation and the object or the space represented. One version proposes refurbishment and the other starts from the scratch. And the last two versions repeated the same task made with the physical model, but this time using a 3D interactive digital model. People were required not only to organise the furniture in the space but also to build a full scale cardboard structure and organise the real furniture reproducing their proposed model. Their comments on the spaces they had built confronted with what they had imaged when working with the model has enabled us to compare the different models, as also the different ways of negotiating spaces. This paper describes this experiment in detail concluding that 3D digital interactive models are far more effective than physical models and 2D drawings; when negotiation happens by means of action it provides more creative results than when the discoursive practice prevails; people are more creative when they start something from scratch, though they spend more time. The results of this experiment led us to formulate a new hypothesis leading to the development of an immersive collaborative environment using stereoscopy.
keywords	Visualisation, negotiation, immersive environment, digital interfaces, homeless people
series	SIGRADI
email
last changed	2016/03/10 09:47

_id	ecaade2008_115
id	ecaade2008_115
authors	Bernal, Marcelo; Yi-Luen Do, Ellen
year	2008
title	Variation from Repetition
source	Architecture in Computro [26th eCAADe Conference Proceedings / ISBN 978-0-9541183-7-2] Antwerpen (Belgium) 17-20 September 2008, pp. 791-798
doi	https://doi.org/10.52842/conf.ecaade.2008.791
summary	Making double curvature surfaces in architectural design is nontrivial and presents many challenges. Design and fabrication of these complex shapes requires systematic approaches. Most current design and fabrication processes distribute adaptable patterns over modulated variable surfaces. But to produce variation with this method means many machining hours and a budget that a conventional architectural project cannot afford. An alternative method to achieve such complex shapes would be to overlap identical elements on a grid. This paper presents an approach to fabricate such complex surfaces from the repetition of a series of identical elements.
keywords	Double curvature, adaptability: automation, digital fabrication
series	eCAADe
email
last changed	2022/06/07 07:52

_id	acadia08_292
id	acadia08_292
authors	Celento, David; Del Harrow
year	2008
title	ceramiSKIN: Digital Possibilities for Ceramic Cladding Systems
source	Silicon + Skin: Biological Processes and Computation, [Proceedings of the 28th Annual Conference of the Association for Computer Aided Design in Architecture (ACADIA) / ISBN 978-0-9789463-4-0] Minneapolis 16-19 October 2008, 292-299
doi	https://doi.org/10.52842/conf.acadia.2008.292
summary	CeramiSKIN is an inter-disciplinary investigation by an architect and a ceramics artist examining new possibilities for ceramic cladding using digital design and digital fabrication techniques. Research shown is part of an ongoing collaborative residency at The European Ceramics Work Centre. ¶ Ceramics are durable, sustainable, and capable of easily assuming detailed shapes with double curvature making ceramics seemingly ideal for digitally inspired “plastic” architecture. The primary reason for the decline in complex ceramic cladding is that manual mold-making is time-consuming—which is at odds with today’s high labor costs and compressed construction timeframes. We assert that digital advances in the area of mold-making will assist in removing some of the barriers for the use of complex ceramic cladding in architecture. ; The primary goals of ceramiSKIN as they relate to digitally assisted production are: greater variety and complexity, reduced cost and time, a higher degree of accuracy, and an attempt to facilitate a wider range of digital design possibilities through the use of a ceramics in architectural cladding systems. ¶ The following paper begins with an overview discussing double curvature and biophilia in architecture and their relationship to ceramics. This is followed by detailed commentary on three different experiments prior to a concluding summary.
keywords	Biomorphic; Collaboration; Complex Geometry; Digital Fabrication; Skin
series	ACADIA
last changed	2022/06/07 07:55

_id	ecaade2008_034
id	ecaade2008_034
authors	Christenson, Mike
year	2008
title	Questioning the Primacy of Visual Simulation in an Epistemology of Digital Models
source	Architecture in Computro [26th eCAADe Conference Proceedings / ISBN 978-0-9541183-7-2] Antwerpen (Belgium) 17-20 September 2008, pp. 889-896
doi	https://doi.org/10.52842/conf.ecaade.2008.889
summary	This paper questions the degree to which visual simulations are conventionally assumed to be a primary means of entering digital models into productive architectural discourse. The paper considers established means by which digital models are made known, specifically those which place epistemological value on multiple representational modes, particularly building information modeling software. The paper outlines a proposal to displace the use of visual simulation as a primary means of making digital models known.
keywords	Digital aids to design creativity, generative design, modes of production, precedents and prototypes, research, education and practice
series	eCAADe
email
last changed	2022/06/07 07:56

_id	ecaade2008_198
id	ecaade2008_198
authors	Crotch, Joanna; Mantho, Robert
year	2008
title	Media, Technology and Teaching
source	Architecture in Computro [26th eCAADe Conference Proceedings / ISBN 978-0-9541183-7-2] Antwerpen (Belgium) 17-20 September 2008, pp. 293-300
doi	https://doi.org/10.52842/conf.ecaade.2008.293
summary	With the growing reliance on technology and other visual media to explore architectural ideas, has architectural pedagogy realigned itself with the evolving possibilities of the new technological age? With the above in mind, we designed a program to explore and test this question. The programs encouraged experimentation and speculation. Technology was seen to be central to the program. The starting point was the selection of an activity. Each stage of the process required the student to firstly, carefully observe, then to create an image utilizing different ‘medium’ to realize their observations. The chosen mediums were cubism, movie making and digital imaging. Conventional plans and sections were required to be made of each final outcome, of each stage. As part of and in response to each progressive stage, a space to house an element of the activity was designed. The concluding part required the design of a small urban building to accommodate the activity selected.
keywords	Pedagogy, Architecture, Technology, Spatialization, Exploration
series	eCAADe
email
last changed	2022/06/07 07:56

_id	732b
id	732b
authors	Dimitris Papanikolaou
year	2008
title	From Representation of States to Description of Processes
source	Proceedings of 1st International Conference: Critical Digital, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, 2008: 311-318
summary	Introduction of digital technologies in architecture has generated a great amount of hesitation and criticism about the role of design and its relation to the artifact. This confusion seems to stem from the dual nature of design as representation of the form and as a description of its production process. Today architects urge to adopt digital tools to explore complex forms often without understanding the complexity of the underlying production techniques. As a consequence, architects have been accused of making designs that they do not know how to build. Why is this happening today? It seems that while technology has progressed, the design strategy has remained the same. This paper will deal with the following question: What matters in design? The paper will reveal fundamental problems, attempt to answer this question, and suggest new directions for design strategies today. The conclusion of this paper is that digital design should also aim to describe process of production rather than solely represent form.
keywords	Description, Artifact, Digital, Process, Assembly, Value Chain
series	other
type	normal paper
email
last changed	2008/06/16 21:08

_id	ijac20076305
id	ijac20076305
authors	Dorta, Tomas
year	2008
title	Design Flow and Ideation
source	International Journal of Architectural Computing vol. 6 - no. 3, pp. 299-316
summary	In the last year, we developed the Hybrid Ideation Space (HIS), an innovative immersive sketching and model-making system that augments analog tools with digital capabilities, for continue and direct reflective conversation with the representation. The system enables designers to sketch and make models all around them in real-time and real scale using a digital tablet (sketches), image capture (physical models) and a spherical projection device (immersion). Teams of industrial design students participated in the study working on the initial stages of the design of a car. This is a comparative study putting side by side the HIS, analog tools and hybrid modeling techniques. We developed the notion of Design Flow to assesses the design ideation process. The students reported being in the state of flow more often in the HIS than with digital or physical modeling.
series	journal
last changed	2008/10/14 14:00

_id	ijac20076306
id	ijac20076306
authors	Dujovne, David Butelmann; Montoya, Claudio Labarca
year	2008
title	Digital design and manufacture based on Chiloean boats
source	International Journal of Architectural Computing vol. 6 - no. 3, pp. 317-333
summary	This paper proposes a design methodology for the manufacture of complex, double-curved surfaces based on the digital reconstruction of traditional structural and constructive elements of Chiloean boats. It also suggests a beneficial association between digital design and CAD CAM for manufacture using locally crafted construction techniques. The incorporation of innovated contemporary digital design and fabrication tools into traditional construction systems, aims to optimize and perpetuate traditional artisanal craft construction of complex shapes developed in the south of Chile. The importance of this research in budget-restricted economies, lies in the possibility of applying local construction and assembly techniques to new sophisticated designs that may satisfy the country's architectural needs. Scale models are used to record the design process and constructive development while information flow charts document the design methodology for the construction of complex geometries.
series	journal
last changed	2008/10/14 14:00

_id	acadia08_182
id	acadia08_182
authors	Gibson, Michael; Kevin R. Klinger; Joshua Vermillion
year	2008
title	Constructing Information: Towards a Feedback Ecology in Digital Design and Fabrication
source	Silicon + Skin: Biological Processes and Computation, [Proceedings of the 28th Annual Conference of the Association for Computer Aided Design in Architecture (ACADIA) / ISBN 978-0-9789463-4-0] Minneapolis 16-19 October 2008, 182-191
doi	https://doi.org/10.52842/conf.acadia.2008.182
summary	As strategies evolve using digital means to navigate design in architecture, critical process-based approaches are essential to the discourse. The often complex integration of design, analysis, and fabrication through digital technologies is wholly reliant upon a process-basis necessitating the use of a design feedback loop, which reinforces critical decision-making and challenges the notions of how we produce, visualize, and analyze information in the service of production and assembly. Central to this process-based approach is the effective and innovative integration of information and the interrogation of material based explorations in the making of architecture. This fabrication ‘ecology’ forces designers to engage complexity and accept the unpredictability of emergent systems. It also exposes the process of working to critique and refine feedback loops in light of complex tools, methods, materials, site, and performance considerations. In total, strategies for engaging this ‘ecology’ are essential to accentuate our present understanding of environmental design and theory in relation to digital processes for design and fabrication. ¶ This paper recounts a design/fabrication seminar entitled “Constructing Information” in which architecture students examined an environmental design problem by way of the design feedback loop, where their efforts in applying digital design and fabrication methods were driven explicitly by material and site realities and where their work was executed, installed, and critically explored in situ. These projections raise important questions about how information, complexity, and context overlay and merge, and underscore the critical potential of visual, spatial, and material effects as part of a fabrication-oriented design process.
keywords	Digital Fabrication; Ecology; Environment; Feedback; Performance
series	ACADIA
last changed	2022/06/07 07:51

_id	ecaade2008_048
id	ecaade2008_048
authors	Gün, Onur Yüce
year	2008
title	Anti UV: Progressive Component Design in Cross Platforms
source	Architecture in Computro [26th eCAADe Conference Proceedings / ISBN 978-0-9541183-7-2] Antwerpen (Belgium) 17-20 September 2008, pp. 69-76
doi	https://doi.org/10.52842/conf.ecaade.2008.069
summary	The executive power of computation, once utilized to inform the discrete pieces of design, ‘component making’ rapidly became one of the trends in architectural design. Idea of components conceptually transformed the enclosing forms of architecture into subdivision surfaces that act as fields for components to aggregate on. While a certain level of variety is achieved via manipulation of components, the characteristics of the surfaces become overlooked via common use of parametric (UV) subdivision. This paper, with a critical look at the current component field generation techniques, focuses on alternative methods of transforming a surface into a digital ground for component aggregation. Series of studies address and deal with various pitfalls of component design and application on software-dictated UV subdivision surfaces.
keywords	Computation, Components, Emergent, Generative, Progressive
series	eCAADe
email
last changed	2022/06/07 07:49

_id	cdc2008_099
id	cdc2008_099
authors	Harrison, David and Michael Donn
year	2008
title	Using Project Information Clouds to Preserve Design Stories within the Digital Architecture Workplace
source	First International Conference on Critical Digital: What Matters(s)? - 18-19 April 2008, Harvard University Graduate School of Design, Cambridge (USA), pp. 99-104
summary	During the development of an architectural design a series of design stories form. These stories chronicle the collective decision making process of the diverse project team. Current digital design processes often fail to record these design stories because of the emphasis placed on the concise and accurate generation of the virtual model. This focus on an allencompassing digital model is detrimental to design stories because it limits participation, consolidates information flow and risks editorialisation of design discussion. Project Information Clouds are proposed as a digital space for design team participants to link, categorise and repurpose existing digital information into comprehensible design stories in support of the digital building model. Instead of a discrete tool, the Project Information Cloud is a set of principles derived from a proven distributed information network, the World Wide Web. The seven guiding principles of the Project Information Cloud are simplicity, modular design, decentralisation, ubiquity, information awareness, evolutionary semantics and context sensitivity. These principles when applied to the development of existing and new digital design tools are intended to improve information exchange and participation within the distributed project team.
email
last changed	2009/01/07 08:05

_id	cdc2008_017
id	cdc2008_017
authors	Holzer, Dominik
year	2008
title	Embracing the Post-digital
source	First International Conference on Critical Digital: What Matters(s)? - 18-19 April 2008, Harvard University Graduate School of Design, Cambridge (USA), pp. 17-22
summary	This paper discusses ways for designers to reconnect their design methodologies with the process of making. The paper takes a critical standpoint on the way architects have integrated digital tools and computational processes in their design over the past three to four decades. By scrutinising the support designers can derive from their virtual design-space it is debated in how far this may be complemented by sensory information-feedback from the physical design-space. A studio-based design project is used to illustrate how students have approached this issue to address aspects of building performance in a post-digital way. Moving between digital and physical models without difficulty, the students were able to study the effects geometrical changes on sustainability-performance in real time.
email
last changed	2009/01/07 08:05

_id	cdc2008_279
id	cdc2008_279
authors	Jensen, Ole B.
year	2008
title	Networked mobilities and new sites of mediated interaction
source	First International Conference on Critical Digital: What Matters(s)? - 18-19 April 2008, Harvard University Graduate School of Design, Cambridge (USA), pp. 279-286
summary	This paper takes point of departure in an understanding of mobility as an important cultural dimension to contemporary life. The movement of objects, signs, and people constitutes material sites of networked relationships. However, as an increasing number of mobility practices are making up our everyday life experiences the movement is much more than a travel from point A to point B. The mobile experiences of the contemporary society are practices that are meaningful and normatively embedded. That is to say, mobility is seen as a cultural phenomenon shaping notions of self and other as well as the relationship to sites and places. Furthermore, an increasing number of such mobile practices are mediated by technologies of tangible and less tangible sorts. The claim in this paper is, that by reflecting upon the meaning of mobility in new mediated interaction spaces we come to test and challenge these established dichotomies as less fruitful ways of thinking. The paper concludes with a research agenda for unfolding a ‘politics of visibility’, engaging with the ambivalences of networked mobilities and mediated projects, and critically challenge of taken for granted interpretations of networked mobilities.
email
last changed	2009/01/07 08:05

_id	cdc2008_181
id	cdc2008_181
authors	Kaijima, Sawako and Panagiotis Michalatos
year	2008
title	Simplexity, the programming craft and architecture production
source	First International Conference on Critical Digital: What Matters(s)? - 18-19 April 2008, Harvard University Graduate School of Design, Cambridge (USA), pp. 181-194
summary	In resent years, digital design tools have become prevalent in the design community and their capabilities to manipulate geometry have grown into a trend among architects to generate complex forms. Working as computational design consultant in an engineering firm, between architecture and engineering we often come across the problems generated by a superficial use of digital tools in both disciplines and the incapacity of the current system to cope with their byproducts. Here we will discuss the problems we see with the current system and the opportunities opened by digital design tools. Two guiding concepts are simplexity [the desire to fine tune and build a system that yields a solution to a specific design problem by collapsing its inherent complexity] and defamiliarization [a side effect of having to represent things as numbers]. They can both affect the designer as an individual who chooses to engage with digital media as well as the production system in which he/she is embedded since he/she will have to find new channels of communication with other parties. To demonstrate our strategy and the obstacles faced we will examine our involvement in the development of a computational design solution for a small house designed by Future Systems architects.
email
last changed	2009/01/07 08:05

_id	cdc2008_235
id	cdc2008_235
authors	Laiserin, Jerry
year	2008
title	Digital Environments for Early Design: Form-Making versus Form-Finding
source	First International Conference on Critical Digital: What Matters(s)? - 18-19 April 2008, Harvard University Graduate School of Design, Cambridge (USA), pp. 235-242
summary	Design ideas, like scientific theories, are falsifiable hypotheses subject to testing and experimentation and—if need be—replacement by newer ideas or theories. Design ideas also are known through distributed cognition, in which a mental construct and an external representation complement each other. Representations may be categorized along the axes 2D-3D and Analog-Digital, plus a proposed third axis from Form-Making to Form-Finding. In Form-Making, the mental construct component (of distributed cognition) arises before the representation. In Form-Finding, representation arises before the mental construct. All media of representation have different affordances. Certain media and representations afford Form-Making more so than Form-Finding; and vice versa. Design educators, students and practitioners will benefit from conscious, systematic choice of media and methods that afford an appropriate range of Form-Making and Form-Finding behavior when proposing and testing design ideas.
email
last changed	2009/01/07 08:05

_id	cdc2008_243
id	cdc2008_243
authors	Loukissas, Yanni
year	2008
title	Keepers of the Geometry: Architects in a Culture of Simulation
source	First International Conference on Critical Digital: What Matters(s)? - 18-19 April 2008, Harvard University Graduate School of Design, Cambridge (USA), pp. 243-244
summary	“Why do we have to change? We’ve been building buildings for years without CATIA?” Roger Norfleet, a practicing architect in his thirties poses this question to Tim Quix, a generation older and an expert in CATIA, a computer-aided design tool developed by Dassault Systemes in the early 1980’s for use by aerospace engineers. It is 2005 and CATIA has just come into use at Paul Morris Associates, the thirty-person architecture firm where Norfleet works; he is struggling with what it will mean for him, for his firm, for his profession. Computer-aided design is about creativity, but also about jurisdiction, about who controls the design process. In Architecture: The Story of Practice, Architectural theorist Dana Cuff writes that each generation of architects is educated to understand what constitutes a creative act and who in the system of their profession is empowered to use it and at what time. Creativity is socially constructed and Norfleet is coming of age as an architect in a time of technological but also social transition. He must come to terms with the increasingly complex computeraided design tools that have changed both creativity and the rules by which it can operate. In today’s practices, architects use computer-aided design software to produce threedimensional geometric models. Sometimes they use off-the-shelf commercial software like CATIA, sometimes they customize this software through plug-ins and macros, sometimes they work with software that they have themselves programmed. And yet, conforming to Larson’s ideas that they claim the higher ground by identifying with art and not with science, contemporary architects do not often use the term “simulation.” Rather, they have held onto traditional terms such as “modeling” to describe the buzz of new activity with digital technology. But whether or not they use the term, simulation is creating new architectural identities and transforming relationships among a range of design collaborators: masters and apprentices, students and teachers, technical experts and virtuoso programmers. These days, constructing an identity as an architect requires that one define oneself in relation to simulation. Case studies, primarily from two architectural firms, illustrate the transformation of traditional relationships, in particular that of master and apprentice, and the emergence of new roles, including a new professional identity, “keeper of the geometry,” defined by the fusion of person and machine. Like any profession, architecture may be seen as a system in flux. However, with their new roles and relationships, architects are learning that the fight for professional jurisdiction is increasingly for jurisdiction over simulation. Computer-aided design is changing professional patterns of production in architecture, the very way in which professionals compete with each other by making new claims to knowledge. Even today, employees at Paul Morris squabble about the role that simulation software should play in the office. Among other things, they fight about the role it should play in promotion and firm hierarchy. They bicker about the selection of new simulation software, knowing that choosing software implies greater power for those who are expert in it. Architects and their collaborators are in a continual struggle to define the creative roles that can bring them professional acceptance and greater control over design. New technologies for computer-aided design do not change this reality, they become players in it.
email
last changed	2009/01/07 08:05

_id	cdc2008_057
id	cdc2008_057
authors	Onur, Gun and Jonas Coersmeier
year	2008
title	Progressions in Defining the Digital Ground for Component Making
source	First International Conference on Critical Digital: What Matters(s)? - 18-19 April 2008, Harvard University Graduate School of Design, Cambridge (USA), pp. 57-64
summary	Terms digital and computation, once accepted as emergent understandings in design, became commonly known and used in recent years. Transformation of techniques from analog to digital created a shift in the understandings as well as products of design. Digital design exploration enabled the designers’ exposure to variety and richness. Increasing number of digital tools became easily-accessible. Thus design thinking in both practice and academia was transformed. Computation, via increasing power and speed of processing, offers mass information execution. Once this power was utilized to inform the discrete pieces of design, “component making” quickly became one of the trends in architectural design. Idea of components transformed the enclosing forms of architecture into subdivision surfaces which act as fields for components to aggregate on. While there has been a great interest in creating variety via manipulation of components as individual members, the characteristics of the surfaces became overlooked via common use of parametric (UV) subdivision. This paper, with a critical look at the current component field generation techniques, focuses on alternative methods of transforming a surface into a digital ground for component aggregation. Series of studies address and deal with various pitfalls of component design and application on software-dictated UV subdivision surfaces. Studies aim to release the component design logic from being software-specific by creation and use of customized digital tools and scripts.
email
last changed	2009/01/07 08:05

_id	cdc2008_311
id	cdc2008_311
authors	Papanikolaou, Dimitris
year	2008
title	From Representation of States to Description of Processes
source	First International Conference on Critical Digital: What Matters(s)? - 18-19 April 2008, Harvard University Graduate School of Design, Cambridge (USA), pp. 311-322
summary	Introduction of digital technologies in architecture has generated a great amount of hesitation and criticism about the role of design and its relation to the artifact. This confusion seems to stem from the dual nature of design as representation of the form and as a description of its production process. Today architects urge to adopt digital tools to explore complex forms often without understanding the complexity of the underlying production techniques. As a consequence, architects have been accused of making designs that they do not know how to build. Why is this happening today? It seems that while technology has progressed, the design strategy has remained the same. This paper will deal with the following question: What matters in design? The paper will reveal fundamental problems, attempt to answer this question, and suggest new directions for design strategies today. The conclusion of this paper is that digital design should also aim to describe process of production rather than solely represent form.
email
last changed	2009/01/07 08:05

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