A New Perspective of Cultural DNA

I make an argument that interactive media for supporting alternatives will depart from manual media and will differ in structure across representations. Further, what designers will actually do with such media is unlikely to be predicted based on studies using other media. Although research systems for supporting alternatives provide many useful suggestions and features, the domain is young. There is much to be learned about interacting with alternatives.

Design of complex systems requires a team and a significant coordination effort to produce a coherent whole that can achieve the desired system-level characteristics. Trust plays a critical role in group interactions with a significant impact on the efficacy of teamwork. Methods to make effective team coordination decisions based on proper trust relationships are not well studied in the literature. Here, we present a notional case study to quantitatively analyze the impact of trust in team coordination on the overall team performance when the team members make design decisions using uncertain information sources. The analysis is based on computational teams where a system-level problem is decomposed into subproblems solved by individual computational agents. In this case study, we model the design decisions of the individual agents with deterministic or Bayesian optimization depending on whether the models used for decision-making contains uncertainty. We use analytical target cascading to coordinate the team decisions where trust is a simple static quantity that determines the importance of the response coming from individual subsystems in the system-level problem. The results show that maximum trust in a team does not always yield the best teaming performance and that trust indeed should be a design variable to be determined based on the quality of the decisions that a team member makes. This study demonstrates these results on a notional problem for simplicity and interpretability while the approach can be generalized to more practical design problems.

To better serve visitors with digital means, museums must understand visitors and their needs. Previous studies investigated the needs and visitor–museum interactions mainly by observation and survey. However, these approaches offer limited insights into the interactions which can be hard to observe if happen beyond the museum space. Nowadays, data that tracks the museum visitors become obtainable on social media platforms. The goal of this study is to classify types and behavior patterns of art museum visitors making use of social networking data. Data collection started with the five most followed Korean art museums on the social networking service Instagram. We sampled 5000 followers from their official accounts and collected all hashtags used by these users. Our findings show that Korean art museum visitors exhibited different characteristics and behavior patterns. Users can be clustered into six groups based on their network modularity. This paper describes how the six groups are different in terms of their social network features and hashtags. The study demonstrates how social network analysis techniques can be employed in visitor research. The results also have real-world implications and set the basis for future research in a real-world setting.

We present a general shape grammar implementation that supports subshape detection and handles lines and labeled points in three-dimensional space. Its front and back ends are both set in the CAD application Rhinoceros3D. Informal observations of designers using the implementation suggest that they are more interested in producing designs to work with than in using the more specialized features of shape grammars. This in turn suggests that researchers who create such implementations have more to learn about how designers use them or would like to do so.

A brief survey of the expressive power of Shape Machine, a new shape grammar interpreter, is presented. The work is presented in two parts: A brief presentation of a series of shape computations that have been routinely used as benchmarks for the design tasks a shape grammar interpreter should be able to accomplish; and a brief exploration of design applications in various domains, namely product modeling, mechanical, and architectural design to suggest possibilities for new design workflows and/or new trajectories in new domains too. Some speculations on the future of the technology pertaining to its potential usage in a new paradigm of programming with shapes (programming by drawing) and/or the envision of a new paradigm of a physical computer are presented in the end.

This paper evaluates shape grammars as a methodology to decode the cultural DNA of a set of fragmentary archaeological artefacts for parallel and precedent analysis and the definition of typologies of artefacts and buildings. Three historical grammars—one symbolic and grammar two shape grammars—and a recent shape grammar of a whole building type are reviewed. The paper draws conclusions on the contribution of shape grammars for archaeological typologies as well as the challenges and limitations of shape grammars in archaeological research.

This article presents a formal method with an emphasis on the symmetry of the wallpaper group in the description and construction of building screens. First, the Islamic architectural element Mashrabiya is examined in terms of its cultural, functional, and aesthetic issues. In particular, the significance of the symmetric patterns in Mashrabiya is briefly discussed. The symmetry principle is further employed to test the design possibilities of generating different window screens by arraying a simple motif according to the principle, deforming the motif, and overlaying various symmetries of the wallpaper group. The method may be applied to infinite building screen designs, thereby providing dynamic exterior views and internal spatial atmosphere.

In the design of cities in recent video games, architecture, narrative and interaction influence each other in several ways. The following chapter presents a preliminary analysis of how those three elements intersect with each other within the cityscapes of selected cities included in three episodes of the Assassin’s Creed series. Despite the ever-increasing diffusion of, and interest in, video games by both the general public and the academic environment, the number of scientific studies on the topic remains quite limited, especially in relation to architecture. The Assassin’s Creed series is one of those remarkable examples that prove how the design of cities and architectures is becoming increasingly critical in modern video games. Moreover, these video games also provide new ways of understanding and experiencing historical information. However, despite its success and its richness and complexity in terms of design, art, technology and cultural elements, this series of video games has not yet been adequately investigated. Three main components constitute the methodology that was used to analyse the selected cities, namely the application of a theoretical framework, direct experience of the virtual environments selected, and the study of various references from books to online resources. The research has multiple values. It shows how historical information has been interpreted and blended within a creatively designed work in order to present historically believable, aesthetically evocative and engaging virtual cityscapes, and it helps to develop awareness of the artistic and cultural qualities of video games. Moreover, the study of these virtual environments may encourage architects to reflect on the design of real cities. The present work continues an ongoing research path between architecture and video games and lays the groundwork for further studies.