Rousseau's Reveries of the Solitary Walker

I'm planning on using a similar structure to Rousseau's "Reveries" to pull together my thesis into a book. I'll reflect on a series of walks and my train of thought during those walks and embellish that with the research I've already completed and the experiments to come from annexLAB ...

LaN - workshop proposal from Lauren

Hi School,

This is a feeler email - I'm trying to see if there would be interest from students, former students, or faculty in attending a workshop by Live architecture Network (LaN)

WHERE: Toronto (or maybe Cambridge if there's enough local interest)
WHEN: 3 days (consecutively) between April 16 -21

WHO THEY ARE: http://www.livearch itecture. net/

LaN approaches architectural development through interdiscipl inary collaborations enabled by DIGITAL DESIGN + FABRICATION. LaN recognizes the power of digital fabrication, not merely as a toolset of a high technical caliber, but as the driver of particular groupings of resources–an organization of human, economic, and material assets–varying widely based on project circumstances. LaN’s mode of operation is PARAMETRIC in nature, and seeks to re-associate architecture with a flexible, collaborative, & data-rich practice of SPATIAL DESIGN. >>

THE WORKSHOP: Critical Practices of ‘LIVE ARCHITECTURE’ http://www.livearch itecture. net/archives/ 5230

3 day seminar on LIVE aspects of digital design & fabrication for architecture

Its clear in 2010 perhaps more than ever that significant shifts in economies and culture can occur extremely rapidly; climatic crisis can devastate enormous populations in seconds. Our architectural response time is critical. The architectural recourse of one crisis needs to be more than a temporary fix as it is often the only opportunity to implement further preventative measures for a future occurrence.

Parametric practices are moving architectural design on a micro-scale through dynamic modeling & on more significantly on a macro-scale towards a dynamic architectural medium–a Live practice. LaN asks you to abandon representation modes of design and practice LIVE.

NOTE: The workshop is a combination of lecture and instruction labs in Rhino. For those of you who are interested in attending, but who aren't confident in your Rhino skills (like me), we can arrange a half-day intro tutorial to bring you up to speed.

COST: between $225 and $350 depending on how soon you sign up

IF YOU'RE INTERESTED: Let me know! They are interested in bringing the workshop here, but only if people will show up. So if I don't here from you - it won't happen.
You can respond to me at laurenbarhydt@ gmail.com
Also, the workshop would be open to anyone so pass it around to your working friends!

best,
Lauren

Mapping the Campus (using locative technologies) - a sketch of a proposal

Using an iPhone, combine GPS and accelerometer data (standard in the iPhone) to trace in 4D the paths of people (graduate students in architecture) exploring main campus, taking photos (on the iPhone), sketching (on the iPad???), and writing about what they sense and what “senses” them. (Pick a couple of useful applications already in existence for blogging and photographing with geo-tagging (i've heard Breadcrumbs is a good start), and write a program in Processing (a software good for this sort of thing – interactive computer-mediated environments designed by artsy types) to collect the GPS and accelerometer info and map it (with a decay function built-in i.e., the lines disappear over time) – unless an application doing that already exists, too.

Data is streamed into a map-blog which plots the paths followed, and represents associated information (text, photos, sketches) as pins/links/banners. The spatial (locative) data must be formatted in such a way as to be able to be integrated into a sketchup model. (**for later: Including a pin indicating the map-blog reader's current position would permit that user to orient themselves and find any place that had already been visited and “posted.” A search mechanism would be necessary (something like google earth, in spatial organization (the zooming in-and-out), or mapquest but rather than searching for an address a keyword search (like evernote, searches text, tags, AND PICTURES) would be best.)

A field of beacons of some sort – pylons with a multicoloured/dimming light might do, maybe a screen, a touchscreen, an (iPad???) – could also re-present some/all of the data, disseminating collected info and advertising the available resource.

This could be a stand-alone project as research for the wayfinding system design (narrative, photographic (and possibly occupation) data and 3D modeled paths – with some degree of accuracy, not likely a perfect model, but one that offers a frame on which to hang more detailed models), or it could be incorporated into the final signage design and become a self-renewing wayfinding resource (a student would have to agree to broadcast their location and other privacy concerns would have to be addressed). Incorporation of this system into the final product would also potentially provide a platform for all sorts of spatial research in the School of Architecture and other faculties: students could write their own applications for the iPhone and advertise approved projects through the wayfinding system and/or draw data from the wayfinding website.

COMMENTS? IDEAS? i'd love to hear from you all about this

walking

Figure 2: Guy Debord's The Naked City,1957 i

“Our central idea is that of the construction of situations, that is to say, the concrete construction of momentary ambiences of life and their transformation into a superior passional quality. We must develop a methodical intervention based on the complex factors of two components in perpetual interaction, the material environment of life and the comportments which it gives rise to and which radically transform it.”ii

Guy Debord, "Report on the Construction of Situations”

Mu(tating)/Mu(table) Place

I am a psychogeographer! Perhaps... I am, at least, enamored with THE NAKED CITY. “ILLUSTRATION DE L'HYPOTHÉSE DES PLAQUES TOURNANTES EN PSYCHOGEOGRAPHIQUE.” I wonder at the affect of place; the emotional and behavioral aftermath of people mingling in un-space: filled space, dense space; sensed and sensing space. I'm interested in the sensual connections within matter, and, as (as … as if I was, or when I will be) an architect, I think (i feel?) I ought to be conscious of the sensuous exchanges taking place, for example, between the call of a bird and photons, between a tree and a pond+iii... and within that consciousness, I will make a call of my own; sending (something, some message … ?) into some place for it to sense and be sensed. I wait to hear back … and work to create new “techniques of sending”iv (depending on what mangled echo returns, I suppose).

+ “However intricate it may be, the call is one emanation, a sound ensemble, specific in pitches, duration, pattern and intensity typical first of that bird's species but further modulated within that typically to be uniquely characteristic of that individual bird. The bird call does not contain, but is intimately shaped by both the history of the species and the history of the individual bird. In the bird's chicks, the call feels like mother, in another member of its species, the call feels erotic or maddening, depending on the other's sex; to a nearby hawk the same call fells like an urge to hunt, in a vole panic, in a poet walking in the woods a feeling that cascades into a lyrical turn of language, in a composer into a musical imagination, in a camper background noise.

To a heavy snowbank, the call does not feel like much, but had it been 10 hertz higher in pitch or 10 decibels louder in volume, the snow bank might have felt the call enough to avalanche. A blush of protons, rushing from a tree to reflect off a pond nearby feels virtually nothing of the call at all, nor does the call feel much of them. But the air between the tree and the pond feels some of the photons, heats up and changes density, an effect the call feels.”

Jeffrey Kipnis, “On the Wild Side”

Perhaps I'll tell you where this started:

I noticed a six-foot-high wood fence extending perpendicularly from the back of an old, mangled building into what-used-to-be-a-lane-but-is-now-a-parking-lot. A fence next to a door which recedes into a building opening onto stairs leading up to a hallway which smells like stale cigarette smoke and run-down apartments which the police know. People spill out of the door through the recess into the field of the fence … a group slows and bulges – its inertia momentarily depleted – then, replenished by the distance, it elongates again, peeling itself away from the building and into the places – the dense, filled, sensing and sensed spaces – of the city.

A few meters past the recess and up three steps is the back entrance to a quiet, elegant restaurant serving local lawyers, bankers and business-people working in the remains of the historic downtown core of this mid-size Ontario city. As the tenants from upstairs linger, caught in the fence's field, the restaurant's patrons march through the billowing cloud of their presence, into the echoing emptiness of the dining room.

Figure 3: Siegfried Gaß's “Structures in Space and Time”

“The structures in space and time have typical phenotypes, depending on whether energy or matter is transported in space by the local motion of the particles. Waves produce periodically recurring motions which transport energy as a function of time (from top to bottom, left: images 1 and 2). If material particles are transported in space, motions of rotation are produced in an enclosed space which form vortexes. Further characteristic families of forms are ring vortexes (image 3), Bénard cells (right: image 4), helical vortexes (image 5), and vortex streets (image 6).”v

Siegfried Gaß, IL Form Force Mass 5: Experiments

The architectural components of this tiny scene –

The fence, the recess, the doors, the stoop and the what-used-to-be-a-lane-but-is-now-a-parking-lot – were pulled this way and that on sketch paper and in construction drawings: organizing circulation, offering or obscuring views and access, permitting or preventing the development of fields of attraction and fields of dispersion, etc., etc.. They existed before that and they've existed more than once, as abstractions in the mind of a designer or builder, differentiated into (a) building(s), deformed or reorganized to resolve material and temporal issues of construction, modifying (establishing? resetting?) the material organization of this place – the matter of this place. This new organism (organized matter, organization of matter) – this building – does not so much transcend the individual properties of its components as absorb them into a new whole with new properties existing within and forming part of an ecosystem; forming the place where the billowing clouds of presence mingle propelled by the sensual connections within matter and contained within fields of organization or decay. 

I lied. That's not where it started.

It started with a story from The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations by James Suroweicki: Francis Galton recounts a visit to a country fair where fair-goers were invited to guess the butchered weight of an ox and record their guess on a slip of paper. After the winner was announced, Galton collected all of the guesses and found that the crowd accurately guessed the weight of an ox when their individual guesses were averaged. This average was closer to the ox's true butchered weight than the individual guesses, including the separate estimates made by experts.

I like this story for two reasons: First, it presents a philosophical paradigm whereby collectively human beings can be considered an organism which has the property (in certain circumstances) of superior problem-solving capabilities when measured against the problem-solving capabilities of the individual members of the group. This paradigm inherently rewards diversity, respect for independence and cooperation within the group (the neutral aggregation of independent perspectives produces hyper-accurate results) – values which I celebrate (is that too naked a thing to say in a research paper?). There is something remarkable, too, about the possibility that either reality is the average of our collective understandings of it (the ox weighs x lbs. because x lbs. is the average imagined mass of the beast) or (more likely?) the composition of the collective (organism) is balanced in such a way that we perceive some truths more accurately together than alone (i.e., we each have a place in the whole, its balance of perspectives is somehow maintained). Aside from believing that this paradigm promotes behaviors/social organizations which I think are nice (and fair, and right), I suspect that leveraging the problem solving properties of the crowd-organism, already a tactic being pursued in other fields, could potentially be profitable for architects.

Figure 4: Motion in Architecture: Vladimir Tatlin's The Monument to the Third Internationalvi (left: top), Cedric Price's Fun Palacevii (left: middle), Frank Ghery's Guggenheim Museum in Bilbaoviii (left: bottom), Norman Foster's The Swiss Re towerix (right: top), OMA's CCTV buildingx (right: middle), Zaha Hadid's MAXXIxi (right: bottom).

“If there is a single concept that must be engaged due to the proliferation of topological shapes and computer-aided tools, it is that in their structure as abstract machines, these technologies are animate.”xii

Greg Lynn, Animate Form

(A keyboard is an actual machine, it is technological therefore it is a concrete assemblage. The distribution of letters on keys in space is an abstract machine, it is a virtual diagram designed to limit the speed of typing; no particular test word or sentence exists, and it applies to an indefinite series of existing and future words.)xiii

I'm wandering, I know, and lest I wander too far, let me tell you the second reason I like the Francis Galton tale: It is spatial. As (as...as if I was, or when I will be) an architect I enjoy the spatiality of the intelligence demonstrated by the crowd; I imagine the fair-going people tilting their heads … circling the ox … cradling a remembered roast (six lbs., purchased at the market last Wednesday and consumed heartily with wine and yorkshire pudding and roast potatoes later that evening) in their hands and mentally stacking those roasts in three dimensions within the form of the ox while their bellies remember the sensation of roast consumed and repurposed … or calculating the number of husbands it would take to make up and ox, then mentally deconstructing the husband's anatomy, separating meat from bone and estimating the percentage of man-meat per husband then multiplying that by the number of husbands per ox (calculated above) … (I know. I said “profit!” and dollar signs lit up in your eyes. Now you can't focus and are annoyed that I'm talking about man-meat. “Get to the point,” you think. For the sake of my musings and your willingness to indulge them, I will tell you know that I have no gold nugget for you; no gold dust, even. I am staking a piece of intellectual ground and weaving you a tale about gold because I like the story and I want your attention.) If I (a fair-goer, now) estimate the weight of the ox with math and memory – a fuzzy combination, at best – I get to an approximate number, probably a range: 200-300 roasts stacked inside his hide multiplied by six pounds per roast minus 20-30% for bone and organs equals 840-1440 pounds. Something other than math helps me pick my guess: maybe I hear in the ox's breath a tone which informs me of the size of his lungs (closer to 30%, now), or the turbulence generated by the ox's bulk shifting as he lumbers by suggests that he is denser than I first guessed. The point is that my physical, material, kinetic experiences in the world inform the spatial intelligence I use to make my guess. And someone else has another set of experiences which may be similar or radically different from mine and with someone else and someone else...

collectively our experiences equal the dressed weight of an ox. 

The internet is very good for aggregating diverse opinions on problems suited to the crowd-organism; it's great for collecting the slips of paper, and maybe for advertising the ox-weighing contest and explaining the rules, but it sucks at getting the people around the ox, so to speak. This is how I imagine that there is a profit to be made: by using architecture to access the spatial intelligence of the individuals occupying it, a specific intelligence not currently accessible via the internet, architects would create the building(organism?) capable of collecting the spatial equivalent of clicks on google results; to collect and organize spatial information, and even re-present it (let it shape our places in the way the internet has shaped thought). Profitability aside, dare I say that it is the responsibility of architects, as caretakers of a body of knowledge (pertaining to spatial intelligence) for society, to update the way we collect, organize and judiciously use that information?

Maybe, maybe not. 

Figure 5: Computer Models of Complex Systems: Kauffman Boolean Network from OO Programming in Java (left: top).xiv Cellular automata / random boolean networks from Discrete Dynamics Lab at the Santa Fe Institute (left: middle and bottom).xv From the Complexity & Artificial Life Research Concept for Self-Organizing Systems: Chirikov Mapping (right: top), Agent Network (right: middle), Lotka-Volterra Model (right: bottom).xvi

“Darwin could not have suspected the existence of self-organization, a recently discovered, innate property of some complex systems. It is possible that biological order reflects in part a spontaneous order on which selection has acted. Selection has molded, but was not compelled to invent, the native coherence of ontogeny, or biological development. Indeed, the capacity to evolve and adapt may itself be an achievement of evolution.”xvii

Stuart A. Kauffman, “Antichaos and Adaptation”

I'd like to think you're with me 

That you are roused by the call to find a way to tap the spatial smarts of the crowd and that you willingly inhabit the paradigm of the crowd-organism and building organism. I hope the glitter in your mind's eye is bright enough that you believe in the gold. And that you believe in it enough that we swing the average and manifest a few ounces, at least.

But just in case, I'll stop conjuring gold and let you in on the dirt: Advances in computer science emerging from, and developing in parallel with, research into the phenomenon of emergence (see Glossary) in biological organisms, and crowds, and the form of cities, are being leveraged by some architects to generate or influence the form and composition of buildings. Within this paradigm, I propose to consider two questions: What aspects of human occupation become useful (profitable) inputs for the building-organism? and, How does the crowd-organism respond to the building-organism outputs? (I might sidestep the implied question: What are the outputs?).

(I wallow happily in the thinking part of design (as I imagine do other architects who work in the building-organism paradigm), the working-through and arguing-for, and I suspect that I (and they?) secretly want to preserve this muckiness past the point of diagrams and construction drawings, oozing uncertainty through actual construction and into the lives of the occupants, the people – into the real world!)

My point, for the purposes of this paper, is this: I think that walking is the key, or a key … it's important, or at the very least, I think it's a good place to start. We (architects) should figure out how to design our buildings to sense walking, or speak walking, so that the occupant and the building can start to have a useful conversation (via matter and energy: photons, turbulence, and the “tone” of vibrations emanating from ox-breathing?). 

Figure 6: FOA’s Phylogenetic Diagrams (from top to bottom: Function: ground - envelope, Faciality: single face - multiple face, Balance: constant - shifting, Discontinuity: planar - rippled - pinched - perforated - bifurcated, Orientation: oriented - non-oriented, Geometry: continuous - discontinuous, Diversification: patterned - contingent) xviii

“The phylogram operates to identify consistency across the different design processes, projects, and the overall body of the architects’ work.”xix

Alejandro Zaera Polo, Phylogenesis: foa’s ark

Self-Organization: The Biological Model...

The advances in computer science which I mentioned a moment ago – more specifically, the development of computational models for complex systems – find their roots in the work of zoologist and mathematician D’arcy Thompson. In his 1917 text, On Growth and Form,xx he speculates that the form of biological organisms is influenced by physical laws and mechanics as much as (or more than) than by Darwin’s “survival of the fittest” theory. Thompson identified similarity in the form of jellyfish and that of drops of liquid falling into a viscous fluid, for example, and in the form of the hollow bones of birds and engineering truss designs. (Around the same time as Thompson’s writings, early 20th century architect Antoni Gaudi was experimenting with catenary chain models to define the form of his Church of the Sagrada Familia.)

Today, at least in part because of Thompson’s observations, biological organisms are understood as self-organizing systems: natural systems which organize material in space, over time, and under the load of gravity through the interactions of many simple components (such as sand grains, water molecules, and living cells) - a process known as morphogenesis. It is the differences in the patterns of assembly of these simple components which result in differences in the form and performance of the organism (or system).xxi (Siegfried Gaß, a student of Frei Otto, published an extensive analysis of typical forms resulting from self-forming processes in “Form Force Mass 5: Experiments” published in Institut für Leichte Flächentragwerke (IL) 25. Of particular relevance to this paper is the section on structures in space and time - see Figure 3xxii).

Extending this model to the design of buildings shifts the Modernist paradigm of form “rationalized for realization and superimposed functions” to a new paradigm where form is derived from the capacities of materials and constructs.xxiii To derive form in this model, a (mathematical) process of differentiation is necessary: the process of solving the (biological or architectural) system for multiple variables, broadly defined by Achim Menges, architect and studio master for the Emergent Technologies program at the Architectural Association in London, as ecology, topography, and structure.xxiv

D’Arcy Thompson first applied mathematics to biological form to quantify his theory of morphogenesis. This conceptual leap paralleled mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead’s theory which argues that “organisms are bundles of relationships that maintain themselves by adjusting their own behavior in anticipation of changes to the patterns of activity all around them.”xxv These two theories ( collectively arguing that form and behavior emerge from process ) xxvi bring us back to that rich discourse in mathematical and computational models for complex systems – including cybernetics (Norman Weiner), geometrical phyllotaxis and the attraction-diffusion model (Alan Turing), systems theory, complexity theory, genetic algorithms (John H. Holland), and most recently, mathematical simulations of genes acting in Boolean networks (Figure 5)xxx - which provides the conceptual model and the computational foundation for building-organism design.

Figure 7: Organisational model of differential intersystemic relations (above left) derived by a digital-mapping technique of system-specific light and climatic conditions (above right).xxvii

Figure 8: Component evolution based on parametric variations of the boundary definition points, the seam layout, the pressure of the compressed air volume and the consequent geometry and prestressing of the membranes.xxviii

“The Postagriculture project begins with the recognition of the importance of environmentally and socially sustainable food production. The project needed to negotiate multiple programmatic claims on a limited space.... (The) location needs to facilitate both time-intensive agricultural production ... and extensive public leisure activities.... The aim is to articulate an inclusive and responsive strategy, one that enables a mode of agricultural production that is a highly integrated, mutable and vital urban programme. The project promotes a local hybridisation of intensified agroproduction with public recreation. This in turn demands an architecture that is capable of negotiating and adapting to different system requirements.”xxix

Achim Menges, “Morphoecologies”

...as applied to Architecture

These mathematical and computational models (all based on calculus, the mathematical study of change) have, so far, found their way into built architecture through topological surfaces functions in CAD software (which are so prolific they appear as the sandbox tools in the free and popular Google SketchUp software), time-and-force modeling attributes in animation software and parameter-based modeling.xxxi But architectural researchers and experimental designers are attempting to instrumentalize the most recent mathematical advances (those computational models of complex systems) and their corollary conceptual models.

For example: “phylogenesis” is used to generate diagrams for architectural design. Foreign Office Architects analyzed ten's years of their own work, classifying it in the manner of a phylogenetic tree (Figure 6) in the hopes that they could “address general questions about the identity and the consistency and the operativity of an architectural practice today.”xxxii Why inhabit the building-organism paradigm? “By constructing our identity from a populational analysis of the projects, we are trying to avoid constructing it on the basis of idealistic or critical claims. We are constructing the consistency of our practice out of its own material, understanding our production as a non-arbitrary group of individuals that may or may not share features and therefore belong to a species. From this perspective, our practice may be seen as a phylogenetic process in which seeds proliferate in time across different environments, generating differentiated yet consistent organisms that evolve through time and across different environments.”xxxiii

“Morpho-ecologies” are formal, structural and programmatic solutions to architectural problems. (One of the keys to understanding this approach is an acute awareness of the shift from geometric to differential mathematics in architectural design: that is to say the shift from static to dynamic forms in architecture.xxxiv Parametric modeling is one of the tools architects can use to design using differential mathematics. “Parametric Model: It maintains consistent relationships between elements as the model is manipulated. For example, in a parametric building modeler, if the pitch of the roof is changed, the walls automatically follow the revised roof line.”xxxv) Postagriculture, one of Achim Menges’ designs using a morpho-ecological approach, is designed through multiple acts of differentiation. (A differential equation is a mathematical equation for an unknown function of one or several variables that relates the values of the function itself and its derivatives of various orders. Differential equations play a prominent role in engineering, physics, economics and other disciplines.)xxxviii For example, the light level within the structure is a function of available light and transparency of material, the transparency of the material is a function of its density, the structural capacity of the material is also a function of its density and so on. If particular light levels are required within a building, a differential equation will be necessary to solve the relationship between light, material thickness, and structural capacity (Figures 7 and 8).

Figure 9: Andrew Kudless' p_wall (from top to bottom, left: initial pattern, array of points (density correlated to greyscale value), panel distribution; right: dowels to restrain fabric located at points from step 2, plaster poured into elasticated fabric mould, final surface form).xxxvi 

“Kudless has established himself as a prominent figure in a new generation of architectural researchers whose investigation traverse physical “self-organized” production and computational processes; their material systems use pattern and surface differentiation to produce gradients of performance that transcend the atelier tradition of experimentation with arrangements of materials stressed to produce stable organizations.”xxxvii

Michael Weinstock, “Surfaces of Self-organization”

“Material emergence” develops the architect’s intuition for animate forms. Andrew Kudless is one of the architects who have begun experimenting with self-forming processes paired with evolutionary design methods to find forms with inherent potential for self-organization during fabrication (Figure 9xxxix) concentrating on processes suitable for the fabrication of surfaces. Surface, in this building-organism paradigm, is that part of the complex system through which energy, materials, and information are exchanged with the surrounding environment. “This new potential for architectural surfaces is predicated on a parallel interest in territory - territory on which spaces flow into one another, and on which connectivity and integration are enhanced. The experience of these surface territories and spaces is at once private and public, interior and exterior - a manifestation of the contemporary cultural condition.”xl

as I consider these experiments …

These examples offer a toolkit of potential experiments through which to investigate how a building can gather and release information, material or energy (the possible inputs/outputs of the building-organism), but I find myself wondering how human occupation of a space offers energy, information, or material to the building-organism, and thus how the surface can best vector these exchanges. You could say that I'm interested in the market (the process of exchange), more so than the town hall (the organizers). Maybe if I call myself a nomad that interest will make sense – which fits, I suppose, if you'll believe that from nomads, not their settled counter-cultures, sprung architecture.

Francesco Carrera rests his argument in Walkscapes – that walking is a tool that permits interactive intervention in place – on a lyrically-told narrative tracing architecture's nomadic lineage. He claims that walking is man's first aesthetic act, and that through walking, man constructs an order on which is developed the architecture of situated objects. Carrera argues that architects and architecture are ready for the persistent re-writing of space/place that design rooted in wandering requires. As evidence, he points to 20th century cultural movements which embraced experiments in walking (I am finally back to the beginning of my dérive) and asks that architects to re-inhabit the paradigm those wanders elicit (that of the nomad “penetrating the territories of territories of chaos, constructing an order on which to develop the architecture of situated objects.”xliii) Constructing an order within the territory of chaos … This is why I think walking is a good place to start looking for occupant offerings of energy, information, and maybe even material – walking is already our tool (we, the members of crowd-organism) for bringing order (spatial order?) to a shifting territory – we used it once, long, long ago and it must remain embedded within us. The message is not new (chaos, order, nomad, architecture, place, non-place) but we are developing new ways of sending and receiving and organizing our architecture, ways of destabilizing it. And so, to bring occupants back into this unstable place, we coordinate the place's instability with the ability of the occupant to construct a new order.

Figure 10: Map of Manchester: 1890-1905xli

“ ...what Engels observed are patterns in the urban landscape, visible because they have a repeated structure that distinguishes them from the pure noise you might naturally associate with an unplanned city. They are patterns of human movement and decision-making that have been etched into the texture of city blocks, patterns that are then fed back to the Manchester residents themselves, altering their subsequent decisions. (In that sense, they are the very opposite of the traditional sense of urban complexity - they are signals emerging where you would otherwise only expect noise.) A city is a kind of pattern amplifying machine: its neighbourhoods are a way of measuring and expressing the repeated behavior of larger collectivities - capturing information about group behavior, and sharing that information with the group. Because those patterns are fed back to the community, small shifts in behavior can quickly escalate into larger movements: upscale shops dominate the main boulevards, while the working class remains clustered invisibly in the alleys and side streets; the artists live on the Left Bank, the investment bankers in the Eighth Arrondissement. You don’t need regulations and city planners deliberately creating these structures. All you need are thousands of individuals and a few simple rules of interaction.”xlii

Steven Johnson, Emergence

postscript

I'm weaving my tale, and ungraciously inviting this new guest to a party which I myself am crashing, to facilitate (justify?) my yearning to build my own monster out of dismembered experience secreted from its resting place in the night, to jolt it to sending/receiving/organizing (life) and to set it loose on some unsuspecting audience to see if it consumes them. I imagine an architecture which records traces of occupation like a forest; absorbing into its own constant re-organization patterns of spatial occupation discovered through senses stitched into the idea-corpse of my monster. I imagine architecture as an organism in an ecosystem: sending/receiving/organizing.xliv I imagine, too, that the crowd of people occupying a building are an organism. And I think that in order to figure out how to design an architectural organism which is adaptive, which absorbs change and responds, I'll start by taking a close look at that primal architectural act: walking.

Glossary

Adaptive emergent architecture: ‘Emergence’ is the scientific mode in which natural systems can be explored and explained in a contemporary context. It provides ‘models and processes for the creation of artificial systems that are designed to produce forms and complex behavior, and perhaps even real intelligence’.xlv

Adaptive emergent behavior: the system would use local rules between interacting agents to create higher-level behavior well suited to its environment.xlvi

Biomimesis: bionics is the application of biological methods and systems found in nature to the study and design of engineering systems and modern technology.xlvii

Commonwealth: the place we have an interest in, which is made up of all of us.

Complex behavior: a system with multiple agents dynamically interacting in multiple ways, following local rule and oblivious to any higher level instructions.xlviii

Ecology: the interdisciplinary scientific study of the distribution and abundance of organisms and their interactions with their environment. The environment of an organism includes all external factors, including abiotic ones such as climate and geology, and biotic factors, including members of the same species (conspecifics) and other species that share a habitat. If the general life science of biology is viewed as a hierarchy of levels of organization, from molecular processes, to cells, tissues and organs, and finally to the individual, the population and the ecosystem, then the study of the latter three levels belongs within the purview of ecology.xlix

Generative modeling: a shape is described by a sequence of processing steps, rather than just the end result of applying these operations. Shape design becomes rule design.l

Morphology (biology): the form, structure and configuration of an organism. This includes aspects of the outward appearance (shape, structure, colour, pattern) as well as the form and structure of the internal parts like bones and organs. This is in contrast to physiology, which deals primarily with function.li

Parametric Model: It maintains consistent relationships between elements as the model is manipulated. For example, in a parametric building modeler, if the pitch of the roof is changed, the walls automatically follow the revised roof line.lii

Performative Structure: a network of connected scenes that captures the relationships among scenes. A performative structure constrains the paths agents can traverse to move from one scene to another, depending on the roles they are playing.liii

Phenotype: is any observable characteristic or trait of an organism: such as its morphology, development, biochemical or physiological properties, or behavior. Phenotypes result from the expression of an organism's genes as well as the influence of environmental factors and possible interactions between the two. The genotype of an organism is the inherited instructions it carries within its genetic code. Not all organisms with the same genotype look or act the same way, because appearance and behavior are modified by environmental and developmental conditions. Similarly, not all organisms that look alike necessarily have the same genotype.liv

Phylogram (or Phylogenetic tree): a device of classification in biology which is used for systematic study of evolutionary history and the relationships among organisms that have common ancestors.lv

Proliferation: the growth or production of cells by multiplication of parts or a rapid and often excessive spread or increase: nuclear proliferation.lvi

*Emergence: In its broadest definition, emergence is “a higher level pattern arising out of parallel complex actions between local agents.”lvii In the urban form of Manchester (for example), the patterns that emerged were neighbourhoods, or districts, with distinct characteristics which crystallized out of the actions and interactions of users of the commonwealth (the local agents), “capturing information about group behavior, and sharing that information with the group.”lviii

Notes
iThe Naked City, Free Association Design, http://freeassociationdesign.wordpress.com/2009/12/20/urban-transects-revisited-2/ (accessed February 14, 2010).
ii“Report on the Construction of Situations and on the International Situationist Tendency’s Conditions of Organization and Action,” Bureau of Public Secrets, http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/report.htm (accessed February 14, 2010).
iiiJeffrey Kipnis, “On the Wild Side,” in Phylogenesis: foa’s ark (Barcelona, Spain: Actar, 2004).
ivKipnis, “On the Wild Side.”
vSiegfried Gaß, “Preface,” IL Form Force Mass 5: Experiments in vol. 25 of Institut für Leichte Flächentragwerke (IL) (Stuttgart, Germany: IL, 1990): 0.17.
viThe Tatlin Tower, The Slog News & Arts, http://slog.thestranger.com/2008/06/15-21 (accessed June 10, 2009).
vii“O Fun Palace,” Arquitextos, http://www.vitruvius.com.br/arquitextos/arq000/esp500.asp (accessed June 10, 2009).
viii"L'Architettura Che Mi Emoziona," baARCH's photostream, http://www.flickr.com/photos/45225386@N00/ (accessed June 10, 2009).
ix“London Open House: From the top of the Gherkin and more”, SkyscraperPage, http://forum.skyscraperpage.com/archive/index.php/t-138268.html (accessed June 10, 2009).
x“CCTV,” cccdi, http://cccdi.hk/v1/archives/122, (accessed June 10, 2009).
xi“Maxxi,” My Modern Met, http://www.mymodernmet.com/photo/maxxi1-1?context=latest (accessed June 10, 2009).
xiiLynn, Animate Form.
xiiiLynn, Animate Form.
xiv"Kauffman Boolean Network," Soft Computing Technology, http://www.softcomp.com/class7/kauffman/quiz.htm (accessed July 12, 2009).
xv“Discrete Dynamics Lab: Cellular automata / random boolean networks”, g b l & e, http://www.gbl.tuwien.ac.at/_docs/studio/2002/vo/020313/main.htm (accessed July 12, 2009).
xvi“CALResCo Software Pages”, The Complexity & Artificial Life Research Concept for Self-Organizing Systems, http://www.calresco.org/sos/calressw.htm#bn (accessed July 12, 2009).
xviiStuart A. Kauffman, “Antichaos and Adaptation,” Scientific American, August 1991, 78-84.
xviiiForeign Office Architects, Phylogenesis: foa’s ark (Barcelona, Spain: Actar, 2004), 12 – 15.
xixZaera Polo, “Types, Style and Phylogenesis,” 36.
xx D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson. 1942. On growth and form. New ed ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
xxiWeinstock, “Surfaces of Self-organization: Andrew Kudless’ Material Explorations.“
xxii Siegfried Gaß, “Preface,” IL Form Force Mass 5: Experiments in vol. 25 of Institut für Leichte Flächentragwerke (IL) (Stuttgart, Germany: IL, 1990): 0.17.
xxiiiHensel, “Polymorphism,” 86.
xxivMenges, “Morphoecologies,” 73.
xxvMenges, “Morphogenesis and the Mathematics of Emergence,” 13.
xxviMenges, “Morphogenesis and the Mathematics of Emergence,” 13.
xxvii Menges, “Morphoecologies,” 73.
xxviii Menges, “Morphoecologies,” 73.
xxixMenges, “Morphoecologies,” 75.
xxxMenges. “Morphoecologies.”
xxxiLynn, Animate Form.
xxxiiAlejandro Zaera-Polo and Farshid Moussavi, Phylogenesis.
xxxiiiAlejandro Zaera-Polo and Farshid Moussavi, Phylogenesis.
xxxivGreg Lynn, Animate form (New York, NY: Princeton Architectural Press, 1999).
xxxv“Parametric Modeling,” TheFreeDictionary by Farlex, http://encyclopedia2.thefreedictionary.com/parametric+modeling (accessed June 10, 2009).
xxxviMichael Weinstock, “Surfaces of Self-organization: Andrew Kudless’ Material Explorations,“ in PRAXIS 9: Expanding Surface, (Cambridge, MA: Praxis Inc., 2006).
xxxviiWeinstock, “Surfaces of Self-organization: Andrew Kudless’ Material Explorations.“
xxxviii“Differential equation,” Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differential_equation (accessed June 10, 2009).
xxxixWeinstock, “Surfaces of Self-organization: Andrew Kudless’ Material Explorations.“
xlWeinstock, “Surfaces of Self-organization: Andrew Kudless’ Material Explorations.“
xliHistorical Ordnance Survey map, Francis Frith, http://www.francisfrith.com/manchester/maps/ (accessed June 12, 2009).
xliiSteven Johnson, Emergence : The connected lives of ants, brains, cities, and software (New York, NY: Touchstone, 2002), 40.
xliii Careri, Walkscapes, 21.
xlivKipnis, “On the Wild Side.”
xlvAchim Menges, “Emergence in Architecture,” AD Emergence: Morphogenetic Design Strategies 74, no. 3 (May/June 2004): 6.) (Helen Castle, “Editorial,” AD Emergence: Morphogenetic Design Strategies 74, no. 3 (May/June 2004): 4.)
xlviJohnson, Emergence, 19.
xlvii"Bionics," Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biomimetic (accessed June 10, 2009).
xlviiiJohnson, Emergence, 40.
xlix"Ecology," Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecology (accessed June 10, 2009).
l"Generative Modelling Language," Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_Modelling_Language (accessed June 10, 2009).
li"Morphology (biology)," Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morphology_(biology) (accessed June 10, 2009).
lii“Parametric modeling”, TheFreeDictionary by Farlex, http://encyclopedia2.thefreedictionary.com/parametric+modeling (accessed June 10, 2009).
liiiMario Gómez and Enric Plaza, "Integrating Knowledge Modeling and Multi-Agent Systems," Artificial Intelligence Research Institute - Spanish Scientific Research Council, www.iiia.csic.es/People/enric/papers/ORCAS.pdf (accessed June 10, 2009).
liv"Phenotype," Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phenotype (accessed June 10, 2009).
lvAlejandro Zaera Polo, “Types, Style and Phylogenesis,” in AD Techniques and Technologies in Morphogenetic Design 76, no. 2 (March/April 2006): 36.
lvi"Proliferation," Dictionary.com, http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/proliferation (accessed June 10, 2009).
lviiJohnson, Emergence, 19.
lviiiJohnson, Emergence, 40.

playing with the arduino

so i took the responsive architectures workshops offered here a couple of weeks back.  i bought a couple of arduinos and electronic brick starter kits.  i am in the process of developing an "insult machine" (more to come...) and found myself short of pins (pins can each control something, like a button, a switch, a potentiometer (the rotary dial), etc.).  so i went to toronto and bought something called a multiplexer ($2.80), which, using 5 pins from the arduino, allows you to control up to 16 pins (basically, you can do MORE with one arduino)
to use the multiplexer i must move from the safety of the electronic bricks to the wilds of the breadboard (what is a breadboard?). ($4.95 - $9.80 depending on the size, plus $0.35 per wire - i spent about $20 on wire)

the multiplexers details are: 16ch analog, #4607 from creatron
i got one working (after about two days, some help from Brandon DeHart and Phillip Beesley)
here is a diagram, a picture and the code to blink an LED on pin y8 (pin 23 on the multiplexer).

the only downside so far is that light doesn’t blink very brightly…any suggestions?

here is a diagram and a pic and the code:

/*
16 Channel Analog Extender for Arduino
*/

// Set Analog I/O pin to use for reading channel values from multiplexer.
int ComIOpin = 6;  // HEF4067BP(X)(ICpin-01)

// Set which pins tell the multiplexer which input to read from.
int DpinA0 = 10;  // HEF4067BP Address Input A0 (A)(ICpin-10)
int DpinA1 = 11;  // HEF4067BP Address Input A1 (B)(ICpin-11)
int DpinA2 = 12;  // HEF4067BP Address Input A2 (C)(ICpin-14)
int DpinA3 = 13;  // HEF4067BP Address Input A3 (D)(ICpin-13)

void setup() {

// Set the digital pins to outputs.
pinMode(DpinA0, OUTPUT);  // HEF4067BP Address Input A = pin10
pinMode(DpinA1, OUTPUT);  // HEF4067BP Address Input B = pin11
pinMode(DpinA2, OUTPUT);  // HEF4067BP Address Input C = pin12
pinMode(DpinA3, OUTPUT);  // HEF4067BP Address Input D = pin13
Serial.begin(9600); // Set Serial COM
}

void loop() {
digitalWrite(DpinA0, LOW);
digitalWrite(DpinA1, LOW);
digitalWrite(DpinA2, LOW);
digitalWrite(DpinA3, HIGH);
analogWrite(ComIOpin, HIGH);
delay(500);
digitalWrite(DpinA0, LOW);
digitalWrite(DpinA1, LOW);
digitalWrite(DpinA2, LOW);
digitalWrite(DpinA3, HIGH);
analogWrite(ComIOpin, LOW);
delay(500);
}

experimental felt making

at mill race festival galt, ontario august 1, 2009 2:28pm

architectural felt

i'm working on my paper for kathy's contemporary discourses in architecture. the gist of it is that i would like to do a kudless/kolarevic-type emergent material experiment. so i thought of an exhibit which i saw at the mexican pavilion (venice biennale 2008) called wavefunction. 50 eames molded plastic chairs were mounted on pistons which raised or lowered the chairs based on a wave pattern generated by movement around the room. (in the next room was the computer which calculated the response to movement and showed the waves radiating out from people in proportion to the intensity of their movement. i love that exhibit in particular...it was curious and inviting and a little bit magical and it made children and adults alike run around the room, stop dead suddenly, whirl around and run back the other way - just to see and here these chairs rise and fall in waves. and then i thought of felt...i don't know much about felt. there is a felt-making workshop at the art gallery in the school, if i remember correctly. i googled it and found this among other fabulously whimsical creations:but before i even got that far, i googled felt-making and the first two video hits are of architectural felt - mongolians use felt to clad their buildings! the process of felt-making is fantastically visceral - beating the wool and rolling it to make and shape it. so my thought is to try and combine these two ideas to create a felt shape which is the result of a digital translation of movement in a space into variable forces applied to the wool.

A Dangerous Thesis - Thesis Group Assignment

Just like the clock maker metaphors of the Enlightenment, or the dialectical logic of the nineteenth century, the emergent worldview belongs to this moment in time, shaping our thought habits and colouring our perception of the world. (Steven Johnson. 2002. Emergence : The connected lives of ants, brains, cities, and software. 1st Touchstone ed. New York. p.66)

Emergence as a theory is philosophically challenging to many people. The shift in thinking from top-down to bottom-up requires new cultural narratives which reimagine human agency and fundamentally challenge existing narratives. A design rooted within an emergent worldview risks knee-jerk dismissal not only because of it's new-ness but because of it's implicit challenge to the reviewer to reimagine their own place in the world as both individual agent and member of the emergent collective both acting-upon and affected-by the group. In mapping public space, hegemony, social interactions, and social/cultural response to interventions in public places and advocating for further interventions which support adaptive emergence in the citizens of the downtown core, I risk initiating a process with a highly uncertain outcome. Not only will Galt naturally resist change, but it may also revolt against its role as the subject of my thesis experiments.

Designing Emergent Architecture: Methods and Tools

Final Paper Abstract/Proposal: Contemporary Discourses in Architecture Abstract “Just like the clock maker metaphors of the Enlightenment, or the dialectical logic of the nineteenth century, the emergent worldview belongs to this moment in time, shaping our thought habits and colouring our perception of the world.” (Johnson, Steven. 2002. Emergence : The connected lives of ants, brains, cities, and software. 1st Touchstone ed. New York. p.66) The emergent worldview presents a challenge to architects: to effectively integrate this new way of thinking into architectural design, the architect must shift roles from form-maker to rule-maker. To be the rule-maker, the architect must first analyze existing circumstances and identify the rules already affecting material, social, and cultural form within the context of the proposed design. Next, she must select which parameters which will be applied to the design. These first two “phases” of emergent design are relatively traditional architectural endeavors, though the novel application of the information will require some finessing of the methods of research and parameter definition. The biggest challenge of this method of design, as I see it, is that the application of these parameters necessitates advanced computation not normally within the expertise of the architect. I propose two parts to this paper: First, I will identify the methods of analysis and rule development used by architects working in emergent design (I will start with those who contributed to Emergence: Morphogenetic Design Strategies). Second, I will identify and test software which has been developed, or has been co-opted, for the purposes of emergent design while summarizing the computational theory behind these programs (I propose Rhino/Grasshopper/Monkey, Space Syntax, and L-Systems, for starters).

layouts - tests

mapping methods

from mississippi floods: shifting landscape

on observation

"observers need to account for the position from which they are observing if their observation is to be more than an unconscious projection of internalised assumptions" (van Schaik, Leon; Spatial Intelligence; p. 50)

on emergence and the wisdom of crowds

what is emergence? the billiard table: “Imagine a billiard table populated by semi-intelligent, motorized billiard balls that have been programmed to explore the space of the table and alter their movement patterns based on specific interactions with other balls. For the most part, the table is in permanent motion, with balls colliding constantly, switching directions and speed every second. Because they are motorized, they never slow down unless their rules instruct them to, and their programming enables them to take unexpected turns when they encounter other balls. Such a systems would define the most elemental forms of complex behavior: a system with multiple agents dynamically interacting in multiple ways, following local rule and oblivious to any higher level instructions. But it wouldn’t truly be considered emergent until those local interactions resulted in some kind of discernible macrobehavior. Say the local rules of behavior followed by the balls ended up dividing the tables into two clusters of even-numbered and odd-numbered balls. That would mark the beginnings of emergence, a higher-level pattern arising out of parallel complex interactions between local agents. The balls aren’t programmed explicitly to cluster in two groups; they’ve programmed to follow much more random rules: swerve left when they collide with a solidcoloured; accelerate after contact with the three ball; stop dead in their tracks when they hit the eight ball; and so on. Yet out of those low-level routines, a coherent shape emerges. Does that make our mechanized billiard table adaptive? Not really, because a table divided between two clusters of balls is not terribly useful, either to the billiard balls themselves or to anyone else in the pool hall. But like the proverbial Hamlet-writing monkeys, if we had an infinite number of tables in our pool hall, each following a different set of rules, one of those tables might randomly hit upon a rule set that would arrange all the balls in a perfect triangle, leaving the cue ball across the table ready for the break. That would be adaptive behavior in the larger ecosystem of the pool hall, assuming that it was in the best interest of our billiards system to attract players. The system would use local rules between interacting agents to create higher-level behavior well suited to its environment. Emergent complexity without adaptation is like the intricate crystals formed by a snowflake; itʼs a beautiful pattern, but it has no function....emergent behavior...growing smarter over time, and of responding to the specific and changing needs of their environment. In that sense, most of the systems weʼll look at are more dynamic than our adaptive billiards table: they rarely settle in on a single frozen shape; they form patterns in time as well as space. A better example might be a table self-organizes into a billiards-based timing device: with the cue ball bouncing off the eight ball sixty times a minute, and the remaining balls shifting from one side of the table to another every hour on the hour. That might sound like an unlikely system to emerge out of local interactions between individual balls, but your body contains numerous organic clocks built out of simple cells that function in remarkably similar ways. An infinite number of cellular or billiard-ball configurations will not produce a working clock, and only a tiny number will. So the question becomes, how do you push your emergent system toward clocklike behavior, if thatʼs your goal? How do you make a self-organizing system more adaptive? That question has become particularly crucial, because the history of emergence has entered a new phase in the past few years, one that should prove to be more revolutionary than the two phases before it. In the first phase, inquiring minds struggled to understand the forces of self-organization without realizing what they were up against. In the second, certain sectors of the scientific community began to see self-organization as a problem that transcended local disciplines and set out to solve that problem, partially by comparing behavior in one area to behavior in another... But in the third phase - the one that began sometime in the past decade... - we stopped analyzing emergence and started creating it. We began building self-organizing systems into our software applications, our video games, our art, our music. We built emergent systems to recommend new books, recognize our voices, or find mates. For as long as complex organisms have been alive, they have lived under the laws of self-organization, but in recent years our day-to-day life has become overrun with artificial emergence: systems built with a conscious understanding of what emergence is, systems designed to exploit those laws the same way our nuclear reactors exploit the laws of atomic physics. Up to now, the philosophers of emergence have struggled to interpret the world. But they are now starting to change it.” (Johnson, Steven. 2002. Emergence : The connected lives of ants, brains, cities, and software. 1st Touchstone ed ed. New York ; Toronto: Touchstone. p. 18-20) how can an emergent system be pushed towards adaptive emergence? “More is different. This slogan of complexity theory actually has two meanings that are relevant to our ant colonies. First, the statistical nature of ant interaction demands that there be a critical mass of ants for the colony to make intelligent assessments of its global state. Ten ants roaming across the desert floor will not be able to accurately judge the overall need for the foragers or nest-builders, but two thousand will do the job admirably. “More is different” also applies to the distinction between micromotives and macrobehavior: individual ants donʼt “know” that theyʼre prioritizing pathways between different food sources when they lay down a pheromone gradient near a pile of nutritious seeds. In fact, if we only studied individual ants in isolation, weʼd have no way of knowing that those chemical secretions were part of an overall effort to create a mass distribution line, carrying comparatively huge quantities of food back to the nest. Itʼs only by observing the entire system at work that the global behavior becomes apparent. Ignorance is useful. The simplicity of the ant language - and the relative stupidity of the individual ants - is, as the computer programmers say, a feature not a bug. Emergent systems can grow unwieldy when their component parts become excessively complicated. Better to build a densely interconnected system with simple elements, and let more sophisticated behavior trickle up. (Thatʼs the reason why computer chip traffic in the streamlined language of zeroes and ones.) Having individual agents capable of directly assessing the overall state of the system can be a real liability in swarm logic, for the same reason you donʼt want one of the neurons in your brain to suddenly become sentient. Encourage random encounters. Decentralized systems such as ant colonies rely heavily on the random interactions of ants exploring a given space without any predefined orders. Their encounters with other ants are individually arbitrary, but because there are so many individuals in the system, those encounters eventually allow the individuals to gauge and alter the macrostate of the system itself. Without those haphazard encounters, the colony wouldnʼt be capable of stumbling across new food sources or of adapting to new environmental conditions. Look for patterns in the signs. While the ants donʼt need an extensive vocabulary and are incapable of syntactical formulations, they do rely heavily on patterns in the semiochemicals they detect. A gradient in a pheromone trail leads them towards a food source, while encountering a high ratio of nest-builders to foragers encourages them to switch tasks. This knack for the pattern detection allows meta-information to circulate through the colony mind: signs about signs. Smelling the pheromones of fifty foragers in the space of an hour imparts information about the global state of the colony. Pay attention to your neighbors. This may well be the most important lesson that the ants have to give us, and the one with the most far-reaching consequences. You can restate it as “Local information can lead to global wisdom.” The primary mechanism of swarm logic is the interaction between neighboring ants on the field: ants stumbling across each other, or each otherʼs pheromone trails, while patrolling the area around the nest. Adding ants to the overall system will generate more interactions between neighbors and will consequently enable the colony itself to solve problems and regulate itself more effectively. Without neighboring ants stumbling across one another, colonies would be just a senseless assemblage of individuals organisms - a swarm without logic.” (Johnson, Steven. 2002. Emergence : The connected lives of ants, brains, cities, and software. 1st Touchstone ed ed. New York ; Toronto: Touchstone. p. 78)

"Not all crowds (groups) are wise. Consider, for example, mobs or crazed investors in a stock market bubble....According to Surowiecki, these key criteria separate wise crowds from irrational ones:

Diversity of opinion

Each person should have private information even if it's just an eccentric interpretation of the known facts.

Independence

People's opinions aren't determined by the opinions of those around them.

Decentralization

People are able to specialize and draw on local knowledge.

Aggregation

Some mechanism exists for turning private judgments into a collective decision."

(wikipedia, april 13, 2009, 9:24pm)

how can it go wrong? "Surowiecki studies situations (such as rational bubbles) in which the crowd produces very bad judgment, and argues that in these types of situations their cognition or cooperation failed because (in one way or another) the members of the crowd were too conscious of the opinions of others and began to emulate each other and conform rather than think differently. Although he gives experimental details of crowds collectively swayed by a persuasive speaker, he says that the main reason that groups of people intellectually conform is that the system for making decisions has a systematic flaw. Surowiecki asserts that what happens when the decision-making environment is not set up to accept the crowd, is that the benefits of individual judgments and private information are lost and that the crowd can only do as well as its smartest member, rather than perform better (as he shows is otherwise possible). Detailed case histories of such failures include:

Too homogeneous

Surowiecki stresses the need for diversity within a crowd to ensure enough variance in approach, thought process, and private information.

Too centralized

The Columbia shuttle disaster, which he blames on a hierarchical NASA management bureaucracy that was totally closed to the wisdom of low-level engineers.

Too divided

The US Intelligence community, the 9/11 Commission Report claims, failed to prevent the 11 September 2001 attacks partly because information held by one subdivision was not accessible by another. Surowiecki's argument is that crowds (of intelligence analysts in this case) work best when they choose for themselves what to work on and what information they need. (He cites the SARS-virus isolation as an example in which the free flow of data enabled laboratories around the world to coordinate research without a central point of control.)

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the CIA have created a Wikipedia style information sharing network called Intellipedia that will help the free flow of information to prevent such failures again.

Too imitative

Where choices are visible and made in sequence, an "information cascade"^[2] can form in which only the first few decision makers gain anything by contemplating the choices available: once past decisions have become sufficiently informative, it pays for later decision makers to simply copy those around them. This can lead to fragile social outcomes.

Too emotional

Emotional factors, such as a feeling of belonging, can lead to peer pressure, herd instinct, and in extreme cases collective hysteria." (wikipedia, april 13, 2009, 9:24pm)

what can/can't crowds do? "Crowds are best when there's a right answer to a problem or a question. (I call these "cognition" problems.) If you have, for instance, a factual question, the best way to get a consistently good answer is to ask a group. They're also surprisingly good, though, at solving other kinds of problems. For instance, in smart crowds, people cooperate and work together even when it's more rational for them to let others do the work. And in smart crowds, people are also able to coordinate their behavior—for instance, buyers and sellers are able to find each other and trade at a reasonable price—without anyone being in charge. Groups aren't good at what you might call problems of skill—for instance, don't ask a group to perform surgery or fly a plane."(the widsom of crowds, april 13, 9:52 pm) what i think: can architecture help the group of building users follow these rules? more is different / a diversity of opinion ignorance is useful / independence look for patterns in the signs pay attention to your neighbours or aggregation decentralization NOT too homogeneous NOT too centralized NOT too divided NOT too imitative NOT too emotional and why should it? to solve cognitive problems to coordinate behavior NOT to solve a problem of skill is this my thesis? please say it is so...today my only wish is for a thesis...a thesis...a thesis...