ACADIA 2012 – Design Systems, Ecology and Time

A paper entitled ‘Design Systems, Ecology and Time’,  co-authored by Martha Tsigkari, Adam Davis, Francis Aish and myself was presented at the ACADIA 2012 conference – Synthetic Digital Ecologies, on the 20th of October in San Francisco. Link to the CUMINCAD to follow.

Abstract

Discussion of architecture in ecological terms usually focuses on the spatial and material dimensions of design practice. Yet there is an equally critical temporal dimension in ecology that is just as relevant to design. At the micro scale is the question of ‘real time’ feedback from our design systems. At the macro scale is the issue of sustainability, in other words long term — and potentially disastrous — feedback from terrestrial ecosystems. In between are numerous different units for quantizing time in design and computation. In this paper, we examine some of these units — ‘real time’, ‘design time’, ‘development time’ — to suggest how they interact with the ecology of design technology and practice. We contextualize this discussion by reference to relevant literature from the field of ecology and to our work applying custom design and analysis tools on architectural projects within a large interdisciplinary design practice.