Computational Design

Technology, Cognition and Environments

Rongrong Yu, Ning Gu, Michael J. Ostwald

• Publisher: CRC Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780429536373
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Informatica
• Subtopic: Ingegneria informatica

New computational design tools have evolved rapidly and been increasingly applied in the field of design in recent years, complimenting and even replacing the traditional design media and approaches. Design as both the process and product are changing due to the emergence and adoption of these new technologies. Understanding and assessing the impact of these new computational design environments on design and designers is important for advancing design in the contemporary context. Do these new computational environments support or hinder design creativity? How do those tools facilitate designers' thinking? Such knowledge is also important for the future development of design technologies. Research shows that design is never a mysterious non-understandable process, for example, one general view is that design process shares a common analysis-synthesis-evaluation model, during which designers interact between design problem and solution spaces. Understanding designers' thinking in different environments is the key to design research, education and practice.

This book focuses on emerging computational design environments, whose impact on design and designers have not been comprehensively and systematically studied. It comprises three parts. The history and recent developments of computational design technologies are introduced in Part I. The main categories of technologies cover from computer-aided drafting and modelling tools, to visual programming and scripting tools for algorithmic design, to advanced interfaces and platforms for interactions between designers, between designers and computers, and between the virtual environment and the physical reality. To critically explore design thinking, especially in these new computational design environments, formal approaches to studying design thinking and design cognition are introduced and compared in Part II, drawing on literature and studies from the 70s to the current era. Part III concludes the book by exploring the impact of different computational design technologies on design and designers, using a series of case studies conducted by the author team building on their close collaboration over the past five years. The book offers new insights into designers' thinking in the rapidly evolving computational design environments, which have not been critically and systematically studied and reported in the current literature.

The book is meant for design researchers, educators and students, professional practitioners and consultants, as well as people who are interested in computational design in general.

CHAPTER 1
Introduction

1.1. Computational design

This book is about ‘computational design’, which is defined as both a computational and systematic way of thinking about the design process and a set of tools or techniques to support it. Specifically, this book traces developments in three aspects of computational design. The first is concerned with technology and its capacity to support and even revolutionise the design process. The second is about the cognitive or thought processes that occur while designing, especially when adopting new computational technologies. The latter examines the different design environments or contexts that now co-exist and can be used by designers. Rather than being separate themes, these are closely connected, as advances in technology create new environments for designers as these environments support new ways of thinking. These new ways of thinking also require new technology to support them. Thus, there is an overlap between these three themes, but more importantly, there is a direct agency or influence. One of the messages of the present book – is that design technology, thinking and environments are not isolated topics, and advances in each spur innovation in the others. This introductory chapter defines key terms, concepts and themes in the present book. Thereafter, it outlines the structure of the book, its intended readership and scope.

Design is a process that spans from ideation to realisation, or from the first concept to the final product. It can also be understood as a creative problem-solving process with a pragmatic purpose or goal. Between the creative idea and the pragmatic resolution, the design process is typically understood as operating in a series of stages. Each stage cyclically refines and tests ideas, gradually transforming the designer’s initial vision into a functional outcome that can be manufactured or constructed. These intermediate stages in the process have various names that reflect increasing levels of definition, certainty and accountability. For example, in architecture and industrial design these stages are often known as ‘concept design’, ‘schematic design’, ‘developed design’and ‘detailed design’. Such names are necessarily artificial, as too are the number and sequence of the stages. In reality, every design process is slightly different, with some needing to repeat stages until an acceptable outcome is produced, and others truncating, merging or even skipping them. Nonetheless, this staged model of design offers a valuable framework for understanding a complex process. It is used in education, industry and across the design professions, and it is even embedded in contracts. It is, however, not the only way of understanding, undertaking or analysing design.

The design process can also be conceptualised in computational terms as an iterative operation with defined ‘inputs’, ‘rules’ and ‘outputs’. The inputs might include the client’s and user’s needs, budgetary constraints or siting information. The rules typically require a formulation of performance expectations for the design, and the outputs are the completed documentation, specifications and approvals for the final product. Once again, the actual process taken by an individual designer may not follow this precise structure of inputs, rules and outputs. Novice designers, and those with singular visions, may have more idiosyncratic approaches that do not follow this model. For most designers and most purposes however, a computational model of the design process can provide deep, measurable insights and a formal structure as the catalyst for new technical and cognitive developments.

As the opening paragraph in this chapter reveals, computational design is typically defined as both a model of the design process and a technologically supported process for the same. As such, it incorporates two dimensions: an overarching sense of the cognitive logic of design, and a consideration of the tools used to support it. It must be acknowledged that some authors differentiate ‘design computing’ from ‘computational design’ to delineate these two properties more clearly. For example, they use ‘design computing’ to describe a process model that is framed in terms of logic structures and operations, and ‘computational design’ to refer to tools or systems that support the generation or automation of the process. This distinction is not universally accepted and it is not adopted in the present book. The phrases ‘design computing’ and ‘computational design’ have been used interchangeably in the past, and the two different aspects of their definitions are merged in the present book. The decision not to differentiate between the two was taken because this book addresses both computational models and tools and the overlap between them.

Considering just the first part of the definition of computational design, being concerned with a process model, a further clarification is needed. The word ‘computational’ refers to the use of mathematical logic or algorithmic systems for formalising parts of the design process. Contrary to first impressions, this does not mean that computer hardware and software are required. The computation may be undertaken using pen and paper, or graphic rules supported by simple numerical processes. Indeed, the first three decades of research in this field were largely undertaken without computers. The message for the reader here is that when this book talks about computational models of the design process, it is referring to formal and systematic approaches, such as algorithmic models, that may or may not involve a computer.

The second part of the definition of computational design, pertaining to the way tools and technology support design, is also significant for the present book. Throughout history, designers have always relied on tools, techniques and protocols to complete their work. These can collectively be thought of as ‘design enablers’, and they include everything from pencils, rulers and paper to advanced software, multi-core processors and 3D printing. A common point of contention in design research revolves around the extent to which these enablers shape or influence the design process. For example, imagine a plan of an object drawn by hand on vellum and a plan of the same object drawn in a computer and printed on paper by an inkjet printer. One point of view holds that the enablers (pencil and vellum, or CAD and printer) are completely irrelevant, as the outcome is identical in terms of the information it contains and transmits. Another point of view is that the two are completely different, as the process of holding and sharpening the pencil, of creating a sequence of marks on the vellum and using pumice to correct any errors, necessarily involves an intimate relationship between the designer’s hand and the drawing. Moreover, it is possible that the time taken to produce the drawing allows the designer to think through the choice of materials or colours needed. Conversely, the hand drawing only contains as much information as is needed for the specific task, whereas the CAD drawing contains many layers of embedded information that might describe the scale, materiality, construction sequence and even cost of the design. Thus, the computer-assisted version assumes that a higher degree of resolution may have occurred before the final drawing is extracted from a CAD view and exported to a window for being saved as a PDF and then printed. This simple example highlights multiple issues about immediacy, phenomenology and cognition in the design process, and the impacts of technology.

1.2. Design technology, cognition and design environment

This book accepts as a general premise that the choice of design tools or enablers necessarily has some impact on the cognitive behaviour of designers, and hence on the design process and the final design product. The level of impact then becomes the source of debate, experimentation and discussion. For example, in a technological sense, there may be a minor impact when changing from an HB to a 2B pencil, or from a rapidograph to a felt-tip pen. However, the change from two dimensional sketches mounted on a wall, to three-dimensional data visualisation in virtual reality is more pronounced. In terms of design thinking, the change from drawing a shape on a piece of paper to scripting a shape in a computer requires a paradigm shift in cognitive processes. From an environmental perspective, designers have always compared two or three sketches of a design to decide which is better. Today, designers can very rapidly generate hundreds of design options and program software to rank and select the best ones. This approach is called generative design or algorithmic design; it is based on rules or algorithms and it has opened up new design frontiers. This too, suggests that a major change is occurring in the design process.

Across these three themes of computational design – technology, cognition and environment – it is clear that the design field itself is often undergoing radical evolution. However, there has been a lack of critical and detailed analysis of the implications of this evolution and these new developments are raising multiple questions of significance. For example, what are the latest emerging computational tools that are applicable to architectural and design practices? Are we seeing significant changes in designers’ ways of thinking as a result of these emerging tools? Do new computational environments ultimately support or hinder creativity? How can we critically analyse and assess the impacts of new computational design environments on design and designers? To address such questions, this book introduces three broad categories of enablers: technical tools, cognitive factors and environmental developments. It considers their applicability to architecture and design and explores their impact on both design and designers. This categorisation proposes a comprehensive, systematic and innovative review of these developments in computational design.

It is also important to define the three themes of computational design – technology, cognition and environment – which are core to this book.

1. ‘Design technology’ refers to both the technology embedded in a final product and the knowledge of processes, information and applications involved in developing a product (Bozeman, 2000). Therefore, design technology may be defined as the knowledge, applications and processes involved in developing a design. It can refer to both computational and non-computational (i.e. traditional) design technologies, but increasingly design technology refers to the former more than the latter. This is especially so considering the wider acceptance of computation in design as well as our contemporary industries and societies.
2. ‘Design thinking’ refers to the capacity to understand a person’s design process or to effectively employ this process. This goal is the catalyst for the field of ‘design cognition’, which focuses on the study of mental processes, strategies and knowledge areas employed whilst designing (Visser, 2004). For example, Cross (2001) defines design cognition as a cognitive science that studies problem-solving behaviour (including both problem finding and problem solving). Many cognitive studies seek to address the question, ‘how do designers think?’ Design thinking has been described as comprising a set of six primary processes, with some secondary variables involved, including formulation, synthesis, analysis, evaluation, documentation and reformulation (Gero, 1990).
3. An ‘environment’ is defined as ‘the conditions that people live, work, or spend time in and the way that they influence how they (people) feel, behave, or work’. Within the computing domain, an environment is ‘the system in which a computer or computer program operates’ (“Environment”, n.d). The ‘design environment’ is the set of conditions that affect a designer’s way of working, including relevant computational operating systems and processes. The medium or environment in which the design is undertaken – be it physical and sketch-based or digital and CAD-based – has a significant impact on designers’ cognitive processes (Chen, 2001; Mitchell, 2003).

The relationships between design technology, design thinking and design environment are initially modelled in Figure 1.1. This model is framed by the broader design environment. The Design Environment (D_Env) encompasses both the technology that supports and enables the design process and the cognitive operations and behaviours that occur in this process. As such, D_Env is the joint product of both the tools or enablers and the thought processes and related actions. Arguably, D_Env is greater than the sum of both technology and cognition, as it includes additional factors (i.e. systems) that are intrinsic to design operations. These might include quality assurance mechanisms, contractual conditions, documentation and archival systems, all of which are part of the environment but are neither enablers nor related to cognitive processes. Within D_Env, Design Technology (D_Tec) is the set of tools which enable the modelling, visualisation, analysis and generation of different components of the design. Design Cognition (D_Cog) within D_Env is the set of mental processes, behaviours and operations that occur during the design process. D_Cog is not entirely contained within the boundaries of

Figure 1.1. Relationships between design technology, design cognition and design environment.

D_Env, as there can be external influences outside the defined environment, on each person’s cognitive operations. In summary, the combination of D_Tec and D_Cog make up the core of D_Env, but in practice, D_Env> (D_Tec+ D_Cog) and D_Cog often stretches beyond D_Env. These relationships, as illustrated in Figure 1.1, provide a foundation for this book and they will also guide the development of a conceptual model to be presented in Chapter 5. The model provides a formal structure to guide designers in computational design practice through better understanding of design technology, design cognition and design environment. It is also useful as a guide for researchers and scholars engaged in critically reviewing current work or planning future developments in the field.

1.3. Summary of chapters

Including this introduction, this book consists of five chapters. Chapters 2, 3 and 4 are each aligned to one of the three major themes of the book: design technology, design cognition and design environments. The final chapter draws together observations about all three themes and discusses their implications for computational design research and practice. ...