Swarm Materiality at the eCAADe 2012 conference Prague – Observe and Report

Just got home back from Prague, where the 30th eCAADe [Education and research in Computer Aided Architectural Design in Europe] was held. It has been pretty successful, both in terms of organization and in terms of context pluralism and innovation. In this conference I had the chance to participate with a paper regarding some of the recent advancements in my research on generative design processes and computational tools, titled Swarm Materiality -A multi-agent approach to stress driven material organization. This paper is available through the CUMINCAD network and you can access it by clicking on this link. Below is the abstract of the paper.

“This paper sets out to introduce and explore a computational tool, thus a methodological framework, for simulating stress driven material growth and organization by employing a multi-agent system based in swarm intelligence algorithms. It consists of an ongoing investigation that underlies the intention for the material system to be perceived as design itself.
The algorithm, developed in the programming language Processing, is operating in a bottom-up manner where components and data flows are self-organized into design outputs. An evaluation process, via testing on different design cases, is providing a coherent understanding on the system‟s capacity to address an acceptable, within the “state-of-the-art” context, solution to material optimization and innovative form-finding. The analysis of the exported data is followed by a possible reconfiguration of the algorithm’s structure and further development by introducing new elements.”

A brief conclusion – report

The conference involved many high level research projects and a rich generative design vocabulary reinforced by an extreme amount of novelty. I was quite content to meet new people and young researchers, socialize and exchange ideas about our projects and the future of Digital design and coding cultures. Amongst them many came from the sessions on generative design. Specifically I would like to mention briefly : Alessandro Zomparelli with “Emergent Reefs”,Jia-Rey Chang from P&A Lab presenting “HyperCell”, Tomasso Casucci‘s “Behavioural Surfaces”, “Speculative Structures” by Joshua M.Taron, Alexander Pena de Leon’s “Facade Rationalization Case Studies”, Martin Tamke‘s “Composite Territories” and Sergio Araya with “Living Architecture”.

From the field of Robotic fabrication I was intrigued by the presentations of Johannes Braumann & Sigrid Brell-Cokcan from Robots In Architecture and from Jelle Feringa’s and Asbjarn Sondergaard’s presentation on “Fabrication of topologically optimized structures”.

In addition I enjoyed my friends lectures: “Sensesponsive landscapes – A Pedagogical design approach” by Marianthli Liapi and Konstantinos Oungrinis, “Augmented Visibility” by Tasos Varoudis and “Engaging the Brain” by Panos Mavros.

Last but not least I had the chance to meet with Professor Alessio Erioli from Co-de-it and my friend Mateusz Zwierzycki developer of the “Starling” add-on for Grasshopper, Professor Yannis Zavoleas (Uni of Patras) and Ioanna Symeonidou (TU Graz) [special thanks for the info on the cityof Prague] who held the AB-USE workshop.