This video is reflecting the digital logics of parametric design in nowadays architecture. According to Steven Johnson’s emergence, architecture can learn a lot from the logics of swarm patterns like ant colonies or human body cells. Indian architect Doshi’s Aranya housing project implements a lot of those ideas, although the project was realized years before the publication of ‘Emergence’. Doshi set the master plan like the human DNA by building the very first row of bricks and setting the sanitary cells. This ensured a minimum standard. The rest was left up to the inhabitants. Therefore spontaneous appearance is the result. By following the individual needs of their inhabitants a certain shape was created.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YXCFwZa118U&feature=youtu.be

Case Study: Sendai Mediatheque l Toyo İto, Matsuro Sasaki

Reading Text: Emergence- The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software l Steven Johnson

Emergence is a tour of what are called adaptive self-organising systems: systems that are made up of many interacting agents who are individually not terribly smart, but who collectively come up with intelligent higher-level behavior. An ant colony is a great example of this kind of system: nobody is technically “in charge”, and yet somehow the ants manage to behave in astonishingly complex and amazing ways: quickly determining the shortest distance to a nearby food source, shifting roles among the colony members in response to changing needs in the real world, ants wander randomly, and upon finding food return to their colony while laying down pheromone trails. If other ants find such a path, they are likely not to keep traveling at random, but instead follow the trail laid by earlier ants, returning and reinforcing it if they eventually find food .Thus, when one ant finds a short path from the colony to a food source, other ants are more likely to follow that path, and such positive feedback eventually leaves all the ants following a single path.

The idea of the ant colony algorithm is to mimic this behavior with “simulated ants” walking around the search space representing the problem to be solved. The ant colony can be run continuously and can adapt to changes in real time. This is of interest in network routing and urban transportation systems. It turns out that the world is filled with these systems: in the formation of city neighborhoods, in the way our immune system learns about new invading microorganisms, in the neuronal connections of our brains. Johnson notes that this self re- organizing stems from the bottom up rather than directed by an external control factor

The 5 fundamental principals the author talks about are as follows

More is different – The drastic variation and complexity in terms of behavior and numbers is good for the higher outcome of work

Ignorance is useful -The ants demonstrate ignorance and carry out the task assigned rather than worry about complexity of the structure which could lead to further disaster

Encourage random encounters – The ants have an element of distributed computation to it involving the population of ants. They work without any orders and are able to adapt to transformation and change

Look for patterns – Exploit a global data structure that changes dynamically as each ant transverses the various route. They follow their ancestors, and the pheromones in them help them find their path and colonies they belong to.

Pay attention to your neighbors – An individual ant alters its behavior based on the behavior of other ants that it happens to encounter, involving probabilistic transitions and interaction among ants for better running of their colony and adapt to change for good when required.

The problem with the web is that it’s already far larger than the largest city on the planet, and it’s growing at an unprecedented clip, despite the recent economic downturn. When the great cities of the world experienced growth spurts, they dealt with the problem of growing too big too fast by developing neighborhoods – clusters of like-minded people gathering together and sharing their ideas within the larger metropolitan context. The web needs to undergo a similar transformation in order for it to deal with its growth rate. It needs to learn how to cluster.

The connected lives of ants, brains, cities and software  Steven Johnson

The reading makes use of the behaviour, life cycle and overall development of ant colonies referring to it using the term ‘swarm logic’ in supporting the idea of the importance of emergence in order to understand complicated systems. In doing so, relating the concepts to human beings, urban systems and the digital world. The writer describes swarm logic as the collective intelligence of the colony system. Unlike centralized systems that human brains are used to, ant colonies evolve and develop through a decentralized system where there is no hierarchy. The key term behind the logic is ‘local’. Ants process information through pheromones / semiochemicals by creating a functional sign system through these chemicals. An ant colony can only perceive the world from the street level. ‘Seeing the whole’ as the author describes it is a perceptual and conceptual impossibility in this bottom up system.

There are five key points elaborated to follow if building a system designed to learn from street level, where overall development is derived from local knowledge:

1. More is different – for an ant colony to make intelligent assessments of its global state a massive number ants are needed. This is due to the strong statistical attributes of its functionality. In order to understand the development an entire system has to be observed as an individual ants actions are arbitrary
2. Ignorance is useful – evaluation of the overall state by an individual can be a liability in a decentralized system like this. Allow sophisticated behaviour to evolve through an intertwined system composed of simple elements
3. Encourage random encounter – individual encounters with other ants are insignificant. Because of the mass over time the system as a whole evolve and develop through changes and alterations in behaviour adapted through these encounters
4. Look for patterns – the pattern detection skill of ants is the means to circulate information through an ant colony. Abbreviated in the text as ‘signs about signs’
5. Pay attention to neighbour – Without interactions a colony would be a dysfunctional group of individual elements that is further emphasized on as ‘swarm without logic’. Local information can lead to global wisdom

In order to understand the how an ant colony evolves over time we need to observe it in the scale of decades. Each colony goes through phases of infancy, adolescence and maturity within a time span of fifteen years. Although the whole colony cycle is fifteen years the life span of individual ants in the colony is only twelve months. Understanding emergence begins with understanding how the whole can have a life cycle while single organisms are so short-lived. Two key points to remember here according to the reading is the persistence of the whole overtime and that global behaviour outlasts any individual parts. The relationship between human body cells is looked into which gives a closer more familiar relationship to understand the logic. Throughout the rest of the reading relations are made with examples referring back to the aforementioned five points.

The fact that an ant colony is an entirely self-sustainable intelligent city raises the question if human beings can incorporate swarm logic into enhancing development strategies. Ants have a decentralized system because that is the only means for its functionality. For us, we have the choice of incorporating decentralized systems into our very strongly centralized systems. This I believe might be an efficient approach to creating self-sustainable, interactive and smart cities we are hoping to create. I would like to explore options of street level analysis (as referred to in text) of human behaviour in the urban system to learn about any ideas that could help come up with more self-sustainable systems.

photo credits: http://l-oo.tumblr.com/post/47033789207

Steven Johnson: Emergence

Steven Johnson’s Emergence refers to the possibilities of simple components to form a highly developed structure. The systems ability to organize is maintained by a bottom up structure instead of an all above control. He analyzes those topics with various examples, especially by the colonies of ants.

Although a single ant has a very rudimental brain the species is dominant on the planet in sheer numbers and occurrence. And even though a single ant is not able to survive, as a swarm they are very successful. Each ant colony has a queen, but nevertheless it is not literally ‘ruled’ by it. The colony is controlled by sheer swarm intelligence, which is directed from the bottom – not the top. Every single ants behavior refers to the behavior of the rest of the ants. If there is too many cleaner ants, some change their duty. If there is a place with food, ants leave pheromones on their track, attracting other ants to the food source. Learning from the ants, there are five main points that form swarm intelligence:

• More is different: there needs to be a ‘critical mass’ of ants to make intelligent assessments. One or two ants cannot represent any data. But a few thousands can and eventual mistakes or statistical odds are evened out.
• Ignorance is useful: The simplicity of the ant is important to the success. ‘It is easier to build a densely interconnected system with simple elements,  and let the more sophisticated behavior tickle up.’ (p78)
• Encourage random encounters: As the system is completely decentralized it relies on random interactions between exploring ants. This is important to find new recourses and adapt to changing conditions.
• Look for patterns in signs: The sum and combination of all information is important.
• Pay attention to your neighbors: There is no order from above. By local information and action, global effects are caused.

Another example of similar patterns is human body cells. The sums of all those simple cells create a whole body. And despite it is the sum of many things one feels like an individual. But in contrast to the ants, body cells do have a kind of master plan. The DNA does state some order, but still there is a lot of swarm intelligence as well. It is more a combination of both systems. Human cities work very close to that pattern. There is (usually) some master plan, developed by urban planners. Still neighborhoods can derive spontaneously, sometimes planned, sometimes random. Like a cell surrounded by muscle cells becomes another muscle cell, similar population groups attract each other. Artists move to the art quarter, bankers to the financial district etc. The sidewalk is the stage for points of contact. It is the public space where interactions happen. Without this constant flow of information there would be no city life. According to Johnson ‘sidewalks work because they permit local interactions to create global order.’ Single decisions are made because of the behavior of the people around. And just like the ant colony the human behavior works at two scales: the day-to-day survival of the individual and the millennial scale of cities and other economic ecosystems.

Having read this text as well as analyzing Toyo Ito’s Sendai Mediatheque, I think there is still a huge research field in learning from nature.  May it be very literal like Ito’s seaweed columns or more abstract in swarm systems. Nature has many systems worked out so perfectly that human science is unable to do better. Architecture has shifted away from nature during the past hundreds of years, but even though digital design seems to push it further away it can be the missing link ‘back to the roots’. Parametric design relates quite well to swarm intelligence discussed above, it may work in similar patterns. Considering such knowledge, which has been in front of our eyes combined with new abilities to use, it can change our architectural thinking and behavior.

For my research interest I would want to research how to adapt the ant system to something as small as a building or as a big as urbanism. It would be interesting to create a certain pattern or algorithm that would help the design to make people be more aware of their surrounding and knowing the importance of all the small tasks we pursue every day to create a more interconnected comprehensive whole. Design should be influenced in my opinion by these 5 emergence principles because they help us understand some ground rules in creating a more complex and comprehensive final picture by small simple steps that will affect the whole. A big lesson learned from ants is that simplicity, interconnection and order can lead to very complex yet functional designs that could cater for a better life. If the ground rules of the ant colony system could be integrated in our design and considered in design concepts it could lead to a better standard of living and a more efficient system of design that will help create a better bigger picture and help people contribute more to a higher standard of living.