Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Frazer's morphogenesis project took this idea of creating an aesthetically
potent environment for design further, along at least two axes. One was to
explore new ways of communicating with computers. “Our attempts to im-
prove the software of the user-interface were paralleled by attempts to im-
prove the hardware. The keyboard and mouse have never seemed to me well
suited to manipulating models or graphics: a digitizing tablet might be closer
to a drawing board, but it is rarely used that way. In any case, we were eager
to get away from conventional, drawing board dependent design approach-
es.” Around 1980 a system of cubes was developed, each with an embedded
processor. These cubes could be assembled as model structures and could be
read by a computer that would build up an internal representation of struc-
tures that were somehow patterned on the arrangement of cubes (Frazer
1995, 37).
Beyond this, the morphogenesis project sought to incorporate the idea that
architectural units—buildings, cities, conurbations—
grow
, quasi-biologically,
and adapt to their environments in time.
72
As we have seen, in the 1950s
and early 1960s, Pask had experimented with inorganic analogue models of
organic growth processes—the chemical computers—but he had moved on
to mathematical experimentation on cellular automata in the later sixties,
and the morphogenesis project likewise took advantage of novel mathemati-
cal structures, such as genetic algorithms and cellular automata, to simulate
processes of growth, evolution, and adaptation within the computer. The ar-
chitect would supply the computer with a “seed” structure for a building, say,
which the machine would then evolve, taking account of coevolutionary inter-
actions with the building's environment. At the same time, the architect could
interfere with this process, in the choice of seed, by selecting certain vectors
of evolution for further exploration, and so on. In this way, the computer itself
became an active agent in the design process, something the architect could
interact with symmetrically, sailing the tides of the algorithms without con-
trolling them (and taking us back to Brian Eno in the previous chapter)—a
beautiful exemplification of the cybernetic ontology in action. Figure 7.26 is a
single example of this style of coevolutionary design, a computer simulation
of how the city of Groningen might develop into the future taking account
of interactions between the growing city itself, its inhabitants, and its geo-
graphic environment. The quasi-organic structure is evident. As the original
caption says, the generating computer model behind it was inspired by Pask's
work in the 1950s, and this was, in fact, the last student project that Pask
himself supervised.
One can thus trace out streams of Paskian cybernetic architecture ramify-
