Customizing Urban Pattern through an Agent-Based Approach

Evolutionary Design And Generative Art

As the culture of design evolves, digital technologies and scientific developments symbiotically partner with designers to replace earlier design technological procedures where drafting tools operated within tightly defined rule sets: presently we embrace the newer fuzzy tools as design partners. Not only, in architecture, are the entire buildings designed, documented, fabricated and assembled by digital medium, there are numerous attempts to utilizing them in arts and sculpture design. Through generative systems, the world is seen in a dynamic process (McCormack, Dorin & Innocent, 2004). It offers a paradigm shift for the design process in that design conceptualization shifts from creating static objects to creating a dynamic system and actions that manipulate it (Kuhn, 1996). With regard to system thinking, applying changes onto an individual parameter produces several changes and consequently impacts on the whole by nudging the results through relative behaviors.

There is a shift in the role of designers and artists. Unlike traditional artists who design art pieces, designers, today, take advantages of generative schema. In fact they involve in breeding objects by creating systems and modifying rules to generate objects rather than merely design them. According to Galanter (2003), artists use a system, which includes a set of rules or computer program set into operation resulting in the creation of art works. The results are diverse and dependent on the interaction among rules and parameters. The key feature in this generative approach is the ability of the system to autonomously provide a vast number of complex outputs. Through digital environment, users can assign values to parameters and to visualize them (Colakoglu & Dionyan, 2005). The iterative modification of parameters will result in a vast number of alternative scenarios, which need to be culled and tuned during the process.