I-DESIGN



SIAL Team:
    Inger Mewburn


Architecture History Seminar | Tutor: Inger Mewburn
Contact: inger@mewburn.net


Background:
This seminar will investigate the various ideas that have been put forward about ‘human’ and ‘machine’ in the last century and how they might converge around the practice of design; specifically we will be interested in the subject of design automation.

Design automation with computers has a surprisingly long history stretching back into the 1960’s and beginning with the work of the cybernetic theorists. Design automation has many flavours now but started off with trying to break down design into a process that could be replicated by machine intelligence. Of late it has become more sophisticated as it becomes concerned with how machines might generate complexity rather than refinement and efficiency. Design automation is an interesting field of research, mostly for the reason that very little, if any, has ever been put into practice. After 30 odd years of research the question becomes not so much ‘how do we automate design?’ but ‘why would we want to in the first place? And what is the value in doing it?’

Design automation forces us to think about and confront what it is we do in order to design and how we do it. If design is to be carried out by a machine, or with a machine, does it change what design fundamentally is? Does it change what we think of as ‘the designer’? Or does it only make explicit things about design and the performance of it that might not be immediately apparent?

This seminar will be based around ideas of subjectivity and design. What am I referring to when I say ‘I’? This is not as simple a question as it might at first appear to be when one starts to look at the subject critically. By unpicking ideas of what might constitute the self or machine and how the two might become entwined we can look anew at the issue of design automation and what it might mean for future practice.


Aims:
Students will be introduced to two key texts that start to position the digital in relation to architecture as a point of departure for their investigations. We will then cover some of the theoretical background to notions of the self and the machine in the 20th century. We will look at some newer texts which start to place the design and the digital in relation to ideas about complexity; especially the discourses around artificial life. Throughout this reading program students will be studying and diagramming their own design behaviour and that of others in order to tease out some approaches to the key questions about design automation and its place within architectural practice.


Assessment:
Assessment will be in the form of 2 assignments and the quality of your class participation (which will be judged through the submission of your research registers)

Research Registers : 30%
ANT workshop: 20%
Final essay: 50%

Research Registers:
You will be required to submit a series of research registers; the template for these is attached to this document. Not all of the reading s will require you to compose a register - refer to timetable and readings for those which do. Research registers will be tabled at the start of each lesson and used to start the discussion. The tutor will keep this document so please do not submit originals. All research registers will be submitted as a single document in your final portfolio.

ANT Theory Workshop
As part of our investigation of how we think of design we will conduct an actor network theory workshop. This will take the form of a close observation and recording of the networks that might exist within the performance of the design crit. All students will be required to attend and take part in the recording and observations. This data will be distributed and students will prepare a series of diagrammatic representations in groups. More specific instructions will be discussed during class time and a further handout will be supplied.

Final Essay
Your final essay will be of a topic of your choice decided with the tutor. You will prepare an abstract and a synopsis of the essay before the final submission in order to workshop your ideas through with the class and get tutor’s feedback. The final essay will be 3000 words long + or – 10% and will include images and correctly annotated footnotes and bibliography.

Websites:
Bruno Latour: http://www.ensmp.fr/~latour/
Autopoesis: http://www.cs.ucl.ac.uk/staff/t.quick/autopoiesis.html
Artificial Life: http://www.cs.ucl.ac.uk/staff/t.quick/alife.html