Flexible Design and Scripting: a computational tale in the Digital Era [part 2]
The second part of this contribution starts with Arturo TEDESCHI’s interview with David RUTTEN as a pretext, it has been published on number 1 of “Tools” Mixexperience Magazine (the first magazine experimentation about NURBS modelling and Grasshopper world by Giorgio Gurioli Design, January 2011) and, in my opinion, it offers interesting food for thought precisely on the academy — research — practice asset.
First, it is significant that the VPL Grasshopper platform was born by an architecture student from the University of Technology in Delft (TUDelft — Holland). Most likely because at the time the faculty of architecture had a disciplinary approach much more similar to that of the Academy of Fine Arts rather than technical engineering and this began to arouse strong insecurity in students from the perspective of professional practice (AN). Thanks to the charisma of urban planning professor Taeke DE JONG, RUTTEN became interested in developing an IT approach to architecture and town planning. Probably due to the teacher’s ability to scientifically support with logic and data the teaching of the urban planning discipline has always been mistreated due to the strong sociological and psychological components attached to it. The development of the representation and programming platform developed by RUTTEN, through the relationship that the university preferred with the operative and commercial research sectors, impressed — in his words — the R&D managers at McNeel, a software house dedicated to the development of a free-form programming software [3] based on NURBS curves and surfaces.
In one of the phases of expansion and development of Explicit History [4](the first name of the future Grasshopper), the lack of agreement and partnership with Bentley Systems, which then jealously guarded its GenerativeComponents, was decisive. This episode led to a completely different development from the platform proposed by Bentley and is one of the main advantages offered by McNeel (the revival of a node interface already known from Maya’s Hypergraph language). Beyond the potential offered by each tool on the market and dedicated to the AEC industry, the possibility of being able to “customize” one’s workflow in the digital field is one of the most requested features in the last 11–12 years by the market and research in order to improve and optimize design performance already in the concept phase [5].
Asked by Arturo TEDESCHI: “Do you believe that a design tool is able to modify the needs and language of designers or can it only amplify them?” — RUTTEN replies:
This is a very dangerous question, because the answer may be different from what we expect. At a basic level, of course, new software (like all new tools) changes people’s language and approach. Sometimes this is good, other times it imposes previously non-existent limitations. But at more important levels, what are the real benefits? Has architecture really improved in the last 10 years? And possibly, how much credit is due to the software?
I actually have a somewhat confused view of all of this. The CAD companies had promised to make geometry more accessible to the average user and overall they have kept this premise. But no one, with decision-making power, has ever wondered whether or not this is good for architecture. If we don’t let young people drive cars, smoke or handle guns, why are we so eager to give them control of powerful CAD applications? You need to take classes and take exams to drive a vehicle, but I’ve seen a lot of people use my software supported by a superficial understanding of geometry and algorithmic logic. This is not their fault, having had to acquire this knowledge from their teachers, but the sad truth is that teaching is hopelessly behind in many faculties. Of course, there are teachers who organize workshops and specialization courses, but I believe that a global revision of the teachings can lead to excellent results. We hear this complaint from many professional architects. Students — fresh from university — who arrive at their studies have an excellent knowledge of specific software, but limited knowledge of theoretical bases
This answer must be followed by at least three observations.
The first observation concerns the academic world and the actual need to find an appropriate balance between teaching and the cultural awareness of one’s time. Perhaps RUTTEN, but like him, many other scholars, has been able to rediscover a contemporary conscience capable of putting into practice that “expressive adequacy of his time” so professed by Walter GROPIUS through his own need for a strong logical determination of design choices. However, the balance of the use of tools and mindset oriented to problem-solving is a condition to which universities must converge and education so in each teaching foreseen in their own — unfortunately, and often, it is not so ordering everywhere.
The second observation is of an instrumental nature, that is the need to always adopt planning tools in one’s exploratory practice in order to delegate, in any case, the decision-making and identification aspect of the problems to the cultural and mental domain of the operator/designer.
Paradoxically, the integration of scripting in the definition of the design praxis is able to feed the increase in the role and responsibilities of the individual designer, just think that the “construction of one’s own tools” is an ancient practice that has always driven the profession throughout the history of the architect and the designer.
When I coined the expression “Brunelleschi’s paradigm” at the beginning of my PhD defence discussion, I consciously wanted to exalt that culturally very noble practice of knowing how to create the intellectual (as well as material) prerequisites to be able to carry out one’s own design vision. Like the lifting cranes of BRUNELLESCHI, the chains of GAUDÌ or the soap bubbles of Frei OTTO today the professional practice of the architect transforms computer constructs into real tools for the design and optimization of one’s work environment.
Even if in this Digital Age it is more and more a custom to bring man back to the evolutionary species of homo technologicus, it is possible, here, to see how much one still remains tied, both in the real and in the digital dimension, to the nature of homo faber.
The third observation should be formulated by reading RUTTEN’s answer between the lines, its clarification occurs later in the interview but, the data that takes on significant interest in this dissertation is the open and community aspect that is linked to scripting and which forms the cultural foundations of flexible design.
The open aspect intertwines the cultural evolution that drives the programming of operating systems and software with that of “global participation”. This is not the place to explore issues from Richard STALLMAN’s “Free Code (free as in freedom)”, to analyze the global participatory design experience of Linus TORVALDS, a Helsinki university student and founder of the “Linux” kernel (the first free operating system based on Unix platform — the one used by English-speaking universities), but it is certainly easy to deduce from these examples how the producers of software for design and architecture have been able to take advantage of the Open Source wave since the 80s on. There are noble examples in history without retracing rhetorical diatribes of collectivism, communism and capitalism, as was the social experiment of Benjamin FRANKLIN. Carlo RATTI writes about FRANKLIN in his Open Source Architecture [6]:
[…] he had adopted an authentically open mentality: more than implementing collaborative methods from above, he was interested in putting the product, idea or process directly into the hands of users. He was certain that humanity would receive the benefits of the open and free ownership of his ideas and gladly consented so that the public could modify them and actively increase them
It is a question of synergistically intertwining actions such as “sharing”, “networking” and “creating community”, striving to recognize in practice “collective intelligence” not as the sum of individual ones. The example of the Grasshopper platform is emblematic also from this point of view; I say it by using the Roman scholar Publilius Siro's words:
"Verba movent, exempla trahunt",
"words incite, examples drive".
there are many students, teachers and professionals who through the community blog [7] exchange doubts, certainties and opinions on methodologies to address specific practical questions, in this case, the network, the internet, through messaging/chat/video platforms has been the glue to spread from below (from the users), new visions and technical solutions, often sharing “pieces of code” and giving way to what is called crowdsourcing [8] in jargon.
The term was coined in June 2006 by Jeff HOWE in his article The Rise of Crowdsourcing — Wired [9], it is evident that through this practice (thanks to the very simplified network) it is possible to approach problem-solving in a rather heterogeneous way. It is as if Marshal MCLUHAN’s global village conditions were re-proposed in a modern key, in which all the contrasts of ideas and the variegated possibilities of access to widespread knowledge were fully exploited. Through this two-way experience, the Grasshopper blog is just one example, the comparison of knowledge becomes a productive action for everyone and feeds a vast market of addons which, programmed by individual users or research groups, greatly amplify the functional capabilities of the platform extending its use to multiple disciplinary fields: from the study of environmental phenomena to physical ones, offering valid tools for mechanical structural analysis up to goldsmithing and digital textile design.
Autodesk itself, through the Education Community platform [10], and the one dedicated to Beta Autodesk development [11], offers the opportunity to interact with users of individual software that are located all over the globe. In the same way, user feedback (beta testing at no cost) stimulates and indicates to the Software Houses themselves the vector direction in which to invest for the development of their tools which, consequently, will have an important impact on the way professionals and companies work (the changes in the software user interfaces and the interoperability of the computer formats of the files are only a small demonstration).
Considering the change in design paradigm brought about by the use of computational modules, Autodesk has embarked on this visionary development path starting first from the hiring of Robert AISH [12], following up on the studies that the latter conducted between 2005 and 2012 — writing a non-visual scripting language called “DesignScript”. The passage of the latter from AutoCad tools to an innovative and decisive tool for the dissemination of BIM and Revit is short, so in November 2014 on the Dynamo website (Autodesk VPL) the following announcement was communicated to users:
Six years ago, Robert Aish embarked on an ambitious project to create a new programming language written from the ground up for architects, designers, and structural engineers. In the subsequent years, the DesignScript team developed numerous innovative technologies, a concise scripting language, and advanced replication features.
DesignScript is now a part of Dynamo version 7.0 and later, available as both a textual language and visual nodes. This integration allows DesignScript to drive Revit projects or run standalone in a manner similar to DesignScript Studio.
With the integration complete, there will be no new versions of DesignScript. Please direct your questions to the Dynamo forum, where we will be more than happy to help you upgrade your DesignScript scripts to Dynamo definitions.
We would like to thank the visionary efforts of the DesignScript team for providing Dynamo, and the computational BIM community, with such a robust and innovative foundation language [13]
Thus one of the main BIM authoring clients equips itself with a proprietary platform dedicated to parametric and algorithmic programming/design.
When scripting and design flexibility were dichotomously proposed at the beginning, a cultural pretext was introduced so that one could understand the understanding of meaning of “flexibility”, that is, privileged access to the tools and intellectual possibilities made available by technological innovation and computer science. Thanks to this pretext, it is possible to structure and deal with the design act in a theoretical and operational sense in a multidimensional sense.
The designer’s way of thinking is influenced by intercepting the mechanisms of Design Thinking (DT) at the base. DT is a form of thought applied to problem-solving (the first experiment in architecture/design was undertaken by Bryan LAWSON [14] in 1980) and is a methodology developed at Stanford University and then spread to the USA in the late 1960s. It promotes the resolution of problems by integrating analytical skills and aptitudes to creativity, trying to approach the innovative dimension through the application of quantitative methodologies and techniques and synthetic and intuitive inference processes [15].
In light of what has been discussed so far, I realized that the working and intellectual world of the architect-designer is strongly contaminated by all the cultural terrain mentioned above and, for this reason, it is considered valid to formulate a further thought on the theme of the digital design by touching on some philosophical aspects without exasperating the ultimate goal — to take note of the professional change by defining its new possible horizons.
PART 3 (the last one) will be posted next week, stay tuned!
You can find the 🇮🇹 version on my website here
References
to cite this article please use this:
Ambrosini, L., (2018), Data, Digital & Design — Production of the digital project and decision-making processes: “flexible” design in the Era of Scripting and Building Information Modeling as a new technological paradigm, PhD thesis in Architecture. XXXI ciclo, DiARC, Università di Napoli “Federico II”. DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.27158.29769
[1] Arturo Tedeschi, architect, computational designer and independent researcher since 2004. His consulting and training work is mainly aimed at the relationship between architecture and IT tools for design. In 2010 he published “Parametric Architecture”, a bestseller on parametric design. Website: www.arturotedeschi.com
[2] David Rutten graduated from the TUDelft Architecture and Urbanism Faculty. He has worked at Robert McNeel & Associates since 2006. he has been developing the Grasshopper platform for years, the visual programming module for Rhinoceros 3D. In 2012 he won the first prize for the best innovative research organized by ACADIA.
[3] Initially conceived as an AutoCad plug-in, after its success, it embarked on a stand-alone development path.
[4] Explicit History is the Grasshopper’s first name. The plugin was known for being able to view and retrace the entire process of creating geometric shapes produced and more generally of the individual steps that led to specific geometric transformations displayed within the Rhinoceros environment.
[5] Often in the scientific literature, the issue is identified and recognized as “multi-objective optimization” and “multidisciplinary design optimization”.
[6] C. Ratti. 2014, in “Open Source Architecture. Towards an open design ”, ed. Einaudi, p. 67.
[7] www.grasshopper3d.com — officially from 11/22/2017 on https://discourse.mcneel.com/
[8] Request for ideas, suggestions, and opinions, addressed to Internet users by a company or a private individual in view of the realization of a project or the solution of a problem (taken from Wikipedia).
[9] [web link access 16/02/2016] https://www.wired.com/2006/06/crowds
[10] [web link access 17/02/2016] https://www.autodesk.com/education/home
[11] [web access link17 / 02/2016] https://beta.autodesk.com
[12] In 2005 the UK, ‘Building Design’ Magazine named Robert Aish as one of the top ten innovators in British Architecture. In 2006 he received the ‘Association for Computer-Aided Design in Architecture’ (ACADIA) Society Award. Taken from [web link access 17/03/2016] https://www.autodeskresearch.com/people/robert-aish
[13] [web link access 17/03/2016] http://dynamoB.I.M..org/designscript-is-now-dynamo
[14] Lawson, B., 2005. “How designers think: the design process demystified”, Fourth ed., London, Elsevier/Architectural Press.
[15] The main fields of application of Design Thinking are: 1) The definition of the corporate strategy in the medium / long term; 2) The conception of new products and services (including radical innovations) or processes; 3) Corporate organization and re-organization projects; 4) Acquisition projects, spin-offs; 5) Launch of startups; 6) Human resources cycle.
