Computational Studies on Cultural Variation and Heredity

This position paper commences with a brief overview of where the cultural DNA may lie in the enterprise of designing. It puts forward the concept that cultural DNA is not a unitary concept and needs to be treated multi-dimensionally deriving from multiple sources. The paper outlines research that supports cultural DNA research in design.

This article discusses how a simple and efficient design principle may be used to create a large collection of hybrid designs. Applying such principle in creating assembled arrays of designs can generate visually elusive final designs. This paper has three tasks. First, it examines the influence of the fundamental principle on the creation of new designs. Some notions and approaches of designers and architects are also reviewed. Second, this paper examines the basic properties of magic squares and employs its principles in the analysis and synthesis of designs. Third, this paper applies the principles of magic squares in creating new designs. Some examples of designs are also presented in this paper.

The paper investigates the establishment and development of Place de l’Europe in Flon district, Lausanne. Triangular shape, divers levels and complex system of the public place are singular. Particularly, a mechanical device and its effect on the multilevel plaza is significant for urban dynamics. The main elevator of the plaza takes a main role to control divers tridimensional flows. New time-space experience with visual perception entitled “urban promenade” could be accomplished by the particular mechanical device. This study manifests new trend and potential value of dynamics by architectural machinery in contemporary urban place.

This research presents the urban transformation process in Suwon, South Korea, in particular focus on Wooman town to analyse the conflict between the old and new street patterns. Through the 1970s and 80s, the city of Suwon went through a huge scale of development with a steep population growth. With the expansion of urban territory, Wooman, a small agricultural village has been incorporated to the wider territory of the city. During this process, the urban grid has been imposed onto the old street network, and at the end, the organic form of the village roads became varied within the new urban structure. The old streets in the village which formed the main circulation network for village people’s lives are now hidden, forgotten and abandoned. From the outside, the block of Wooman has a typical modern urban landscape with straight lines of parallel streets. Walking inside it, however, one can find strange irregularity of back streets which used to be a major connection in the old days but are now treated as back alleys, illegally occupied for parking, vegetation and garbage dumping. It is our particular focus in this research to find how this dramatic change of status for these old village streets has happened and how their traces could survive through the mega-scale transformation of the city. We assume these traces are the urban fingerprints though which we can find the embryologic clue to reveal the process behind the formation of the entire city.

This paper discusses the role of prototyping as a vehicle to integrate electronic media technology, materiality, and physical computing into architectural design process and education. It connects a creating-making approach to a broader maker and hacker culture through adaptive and autonomous assemblies and embedded electronic systems. It recognizes the need for a new conceptual dis-course on what constitutes effective design methodology that nurtures innovation and considers all design factors: social, cultural, and technological.

The increased usage and application of Building Information Modeling (BIM) in the fields of architecture, engineering, construction and facility management (AEC-FM) has significantly impacted the entire building industry. Apart from the general uses of the BIM application for cross-disciplinary coordination and efficiency, we have explored the potential of BIM as an automated code checking tool that can be integrated into the process of reviewing architectural designs for granting building. In this chapter, we describe an essential and prerequisite process prior to the rule-checking process: which is the rule-making process. In order to automate the code checking process, natural language sentences for building permit legislation should be interpreted and executed by computers. We define KBimCode as a neutral language that is composed of translated building regulations as a computer-executable ruleset file. In this chapter the approach to standardized rule interpretation introduces a logic rule-based mechanism named KBimLogic and its outcome instances named KBimCode, which is an intermediate code that is both human and computer readable. The KBimCode is generated by the KBimLogic mechanism and is accumulated in the database called KBimCode DB. The database also defines the complicated sentence relationship between legislations, including hierarchy, reference, delegation or any other relations descripted in the original legislation context. This chapter demonstrates the KBimCode mechanism and related application with specific checklist and Building Act examples.

In this paper, we apply dichotomous aspects discussed in architectural theories to electronic devices and explore the relationship. In order to investigate the similarities and the differences between how people’s attitudes change for the sense of individuality-communality and private-public in a household environment and in a product environment as the level of depth increases, we designed an experiment with a scenario that guides subjects to explore through a household space virtually displayed on a large display as well as a smartphone space on an actual phone. At the end of every task, we asked the subjects to complete a semantic differential survey designed using the terms used in architecture that relate to both social and spatial dichotomies. From this experiment, we can suggest that the use of analogy between the two environments is appropriate especially as the depth of navigation increases such as going into a bedroom or accessing a picture folder and that social and spatial dichotomies examined in architectural and geological research fields do exist in a smartphone environment in a way it makes sense such as front and back. Lastly, we realized that while the household environment provided static feeling overall, the smartphone environment provided dynamic feeling.

The purpose of the study was to demonstrate the need and usefulness of using a cultural representation tool in cultural product design. In this study, it is believed that culture can be conceptualized with critical cultural elements that define the core features of culture. These elements were called cultural DNAs. To demonstrate the need and the impact of having a cultural representation tool in product design, a between-subject experiment was conducted with 18 student participants majoring in Industrial Design. The participants were tasked with designing mugs that addressed the Confucius culture and were divided into two groups—one was provided with a written representation of Confucius culture (the experimental group) while the other was not (the control group). Results of participants’ design outcomes showed that participants who were given a representation tool of the Confucius culture used more types and higher numbers of cultural DNAs in their design. This study also found that the cultural elements used by the experimental group were more relevant with Confucius. Results of this study showed the need of a cultural representation tool in cultural product design.

Gesture and speech based interaction offers designers a powerful technique to create 3D CAD models. Previous studies on gesture based modeling have employed author defined gestures which may not be very user friendly. The aim of this study was to collect a data set of user generated gestures and accompanying voice commands for 3D modeling for form exploration in the conceptual architectural design phase. We conducted an experiment with 41 subjects to elicit their preferences in using gestures and speech for twelve 3D CAD modeling referents. In this paper we present the different types of gestures we found, and present user preferences of gestures and speech. Findings from this study will be used for the design of a speech and gesture based Cad modeling interface.

While the idea of advancing technology and society are often of primary interest to academics, the general public is frequently challenging the integration of these advancements within society. This complex issue is most often discussed around the role of robots in manufacturing where both repetitive and dangerous tasks performed by humans are being replaced by robotic counterparts that in many cases, can also perform these tasks more accurately. Similarly, the idea of automation through artificial intelligence poses a risk to workers far beyond physical labor, a topic highly discussed for the past few years. From this concern, theories on bringing your own robot to work, analogous to the bring your own device to work movement, have been brought up as a way into the future. Separately, in order to offset the economic downsides of the changing human labor force, and among other reasons, recent political discussions have been actively pursuing the idea of a universal basic income. This paper poses an alternative idea, one in which the advantages of robotics continues to benefit the laborers in which it replaces, and takes the bring your own robot to work to a macro scale: a universal basic robot. These two past proposals, one in which people bring their own robot to work, and one in which a universal basic income is given, have large differences in the way society itself will transform. This paper discusses the trends of technological development that lead to the robotic workforce and the economic challenges of implementing such an idea.

A workshop in formal composition using machine-based specifications of parametric shape rules is presented. The workshop is structured along two different trajectories: one starting from existing grammars and one starting from scratch, and both in a rising complexity in the specification of the rules and the ways they affect design. Rules, productions and designs in corresponding languages illustrate the findings. A speculation on a new design workflow whereas the designers seamlessly design and test their rules within their design processes is briefly discussed in the end.

Different explications of Stiny’s shape grammar for Chinese ice-ray lattice designs found in literature are explored and their ‘practicality’ is assessed in terms of the number of construction elements included in a representative shape rule and the number of potential matches that the matching algorithm must consider when applying this rule to a representative shape. Alternative explications are suggested that score well with respect to both measures. The exercise is meant to provide insights and requirements for the development of a general shape grammar interpreter, with flexibility and ease of use in mind.

Shape computations recognise parts and create new shapes through transformations. These elementary computations can be more than they seem, inducing complicated structures as a result of recognising and transforming parts. This paper introduces, what is perhaps in principle, the simplest case where the structure results from seeing embedded parts. It focusses on lines because, despite their visual simplicity, if a symbolic representation for shapes is assumed, lines embedded in lines can give rise to more complicated structures than might be intuitively expected. With reference to the combinatorial structure of words the paper presents a thorough examination of these structures. It is shown that in the case of a line embedded in a line, the resulting structure is palindromic with parts defined by line segments of two different lengths. This result highlights the disparity between visual and symbolic computation when dealing with shapes—computations that are visually elementary are often symbolically complicated.

This chapter presents a design grammar to analyse and measure spatial uniqueness within a specific set of Murcutt’s domestic architecture. The research defines the design grammar that consists of four phases and 11 rule sets, from the first rule set generating pavilions to the last termination rule. After examining the tendency of the applied rules in the ten selected cases, each case is then characterised through a mathematical abstraction, so called ‘normalised distance (ND)’. ND enables measuring a group of main functional zones in each design as well as their uniqueness in the language of design. The design grammar can be applied for the creation of new design instances, consistent with their spatial characteristics. This computational approach is thus applicable in the broader design domains to extend other shape grammar studies.

Recent interest in new digital and computational ways of making has been paralleled by rising interest in traditional making and craft practices. Most efforts to merge digital and craft practices focus on the things produced, with attention to process only to the extent that it informs results. However, the socio-cultural, aesthetic, and creative dimensions of a craft practice are expressed in its performative, temporal aspects as much as in its products. A new computational theory of making offered by making grammars points to new possibilities for the study of temporal performance. In this paper, I use traditional kolam pattern making in India as a case study to probe the potentials of making grammars to represent craft performance, in contrast with the use of shape grammars to represent craft designs. Different generative strategies are revealed in the comparison.