Paths formed by livestock over time are an example of the natural formation of optimised detour path networks.
Schumachers’ Parametricism – A new global style for Architecture & Urban Design (2008) is an interesting text covering many of the broader topics of Parametricism. It provides the reader with a brief insight into the world of parametricism, it’s history, and it’s real world feasibility & applications.
SimCity 2000
(Emergence, Steven Johnson, 2002)
What is emergence? …And what do human cells, ants, computers, and city sidewalks all have in common? For Steven Johnson, the answer is simple, “local information leads to global wisdom.” Johnson describes the growth of the aforementioned subjects as being emergent systems: complex organisms that, regardless of their scale, harness the self-organizing qualities of local interactions for the overall amelioration of the mega-organism. While he discusses and compares the power of coordinated behaviour in ant colonies, the growth of single-celled organisms, computer based simulation games like SimCity, and the interactions of people in the sidewalks in major cities, it is the latter two analyses that stand out for me the most.
Johnson’s main argument is that successful cities self-organize themselves based on local interaction, allowing the metropolis to gradually change and evolve over the long term based on this information. He promotes the impact that sidewalks have on the overall impact of the city as they are the “primary conduit for the flow of information between city residents”. The repeated mix of strangers and random local configurations allows residents of a neighbourhood to collectively “solve” the problem of making themselves safe. While there may be a global structure such as a city masterplan, it is a combination of this overlying DNA map with the inhabitants’ local sense of place that establishes certain cities as self-organizing systems. The constant feedback between local agents permits higher-level learning to emerge through bottom-up forces. It is no surprise that more than half the world’s populations lives in cities today. The city, with emergent intelligence and its ability to store and retrieve information is able to replicate itself. It is a super-organism that can replicate itself over time, even though its inhabitants have no way of comprehending how their short term decisions will contribute to the macrodevelopment projecting over thousands of years. While we contribute to the emergent intelligence on a daily basis, it is almost impossible to perceive what our contribution will be in say the year 4000. This associativity between part and whole is best exemplified in the reference to SimCity. Using computer-based simulations, SimCity is able to model the behaviour of cities by using swarm logic. Although the player makes key decisions, it is the bottom-up powers of algorithmic simulations on the city block scale that allow the virtual cities to grow by themselves. As each block obeys a rigid set of instructions, the game’s meshwork of cells alters their behaviour based in response to the behaviour of other cells in that network. This is why users see recessions, booms, slums, rich neighbourhoods, crime, utopia, and a plethora of simulations.
Personally, I believe that as designers, we must learn from this beauty of designing through algorithmic data, like in SimCity, but at all scales of our work. We must allow parts, or even the entirety of a project or concept to grown naturally, fostering a multiplicity of possible solutions. Just as we must let our cities grow through the on-going simulations in sidewalks; the rest of our design work should also grow from small-scale interactions that make up the whole final (yet evolving) design. Emergent interactions already exist on the streets, in game simulations, and on the web, but we must extend this to all designs, machines, buildings, etc. Manuel DeLanda sums this up very well in a lecture on Deleuze and the use of the genetic algorithm in architecture. He advocates for the writing of scripts to allow people to exert their own power over software while also endorsing materials that have their own morphogenetic potential to be altered by genes. Through Deleuze’s 3 types of thinking (population, intensive, and topological), the artist has the ability to invent spaces of possibilities while the genetic algorithm searches them for us. These spaces of possibilities through simulations come in all different shapes and sizes and are essentially emergent systems. If emergence has proven to be successful at all scales: cells, ants, and cities, why not extend it to all systems? We may not know what our cities will look like in the year 4000, but we must embrace and promote the evolution of complex organisms and systems through simulation at all scales of our design. Our ancestors will understand. SimDesign 4000.
In this text, Manuel DeLanda discusses the “Genesis of form”.
The problem for Deleuze is that Western philosophy conception of matter as inert receptacle for forms that come from outside spontaneous self-generation of form does not occur. Speaking about genesis of form, it was generated according to the boundaries and opportunities of the external physical forces.
Examples of Form genesis in nature help to understand that the two factors governing the creation of the differentiated instantiations are “Mathematics and Thermodynamics”.
Mathematics gives the shape of the form. And to study the form you can put it in a grid, the form itself lies in it. He takes from Thermodynamics key concepts needed for a theory of immanent morphogenesis such as intensity and ontological commitments.
The two basic types of structures, for Deleuze, are the “Strata” and the “Self-consistent aggregates”, or the “Tree” and the “Rhizomes”.
Strata - Articulation of homogeneous elements(trees)
Self-consistent aggregates - Articulation of heterogeneous elements(rhizomes)
Both result in isomorphic actual forms.
And he also talks about the Virtual versus Actual , the distinction between the possible and the real assumes a set of predefined forms that acquire physical reality as material forms.
Form creation in nature can be seen emerging in many different, yet specific morphological patterns. These patterns vary, transform, coexist and evolve, and are found in all life forms.
These virtual processes are, according to Deleuze, perfectly real, a real virtuality which has nothing to do with what we call virtual reality. And yet, because this real virtuality constitutes the nuomenal machinery behind the phenomena, that is, behind reality as it appears to us humans, because this real virtuality governs the genesis of all real forms, it cannot help but be related to virtual realities, not only those created by computer simulations, but also by novelists, filmmakers, painters and musicians.
Deleuze’s work is, from the beginning, concerned as much with physics and mathematics, as it is with art.
Deleuze’s work constitutes a true challenge to language-obsessed postmodernism, a neomaterialism which promises to enrich the conceptual reservoirs of both science and art and that one day could lead to a complete reconceptualization of our history as well as of our alternatives for the future.
In order to study the behavioural patterns within the city, Steven Johnson applies the theory of swarm logic. Derived from the behavioural patterns in the ant colony, swarm logic can also be applied to the patterns of behaviour within the city.
Johson explains this theory of swarm logic through two contrasting scales; the ant colony and the city. Through a mass collaboration, ants are able to achieve their goals of finding food and building shelter. However this would not be achievable without social co-ordination, as no individual act can achieve these things alone. Without social coordination, it would simply be a swarm without any logic. Therefore, ignorance is useful as no ant rebels or questions their task, but rather follows social patterns.
What is the nature of complex systems? How do seemingly desperate parts of an organism constitute a greater whole despite their ignorance of its presence? This condition is observed at the cellular level, at the level of interaction between organisms, and in information systems, though through each successive scale the set of criteria and the environment for the development of this nature is changed. The ambiguity is a result of local information, that is, knowledge which is acquired by an individual component or organism through the direct interaction with its immediate environment and those other individuals which inhabit it. In ‘Emergence: the connected lives of ants, cities, brains and software’, Steven Johnson examines systems in an impressive cross section of scales to discuss the notion of local information and its impacts. He draws parallels between the organizational structures of intelligent systems that are able to self-organize through the processing of local information, and in doing so is able to clearly define the phenomenon of emergence and the importance of scale in understanding it.
