Design in the Post-Digital Age 

Introduction

According to the tenants of western philosophy, from Plato to present days, the notion of form can be understood as both the process of configuration (the how) and the final product (the visible or sensible form).  Unlike Plato who proposed that form is an ideal essence that exists outside the objects, Aristotle and Deleuze argued that form is an actualization of matter potentials. Design is approached through the notion of form too. However, modernism design theories and early digital theories tend to exclude material as a part of design logic and focus on geometrical and algorithmic concerns. In post-digital era, where the distinction between digital and non-digital is no longer a concern, form is expanded to include the behavior of materials as a generative part of design formation in which “thinking and doing, design and fabrication, and prototype and final design become blurred, interactive, and part of a non-linear means of innovation” (Speaks, 2013). In that sense, form becomes a material system that goes beyond the notion of idea and geometrical concerns to include the complex relation between materiality, form, structure, production and assembly as well as the interaction with the design forces.

Modernism and Early Digital design theories

            In modernism design theories, architectural form is understood in terms of Plato’s theory of Form. Plato proposed that Form is aspatial; could not be described as a physical object that we encounter in our sensory experience, but as universal essence. It transcends concrete objects or physical objects to represent ideas in the realm of the intelligible and can only be investigated by means of the intellect using logic. Accordingly, modernism reads form as the autonomous creative process whereby the designer organizes his work according to a set of unique organizational principles i.e. geometrical considerations (Stiny and Gips, 1978). For example, in furniture design, the form of a chair is defined by the relation between the parts and between the parts and the whole [1, 2].

In early digital design, the concentration was on the distinction between the digital and the non-digital practice. The automatization of the design process and production especially through using CAD/CAM technologies create a prioritization of digital form, as a descriptive geometry over matter. In many cases, it was only a mere transformation of the 2d manual drawings into CAD environments in which the abstract geometry and the dimensions are the main concerns [3, 4].

Post-digital design [The impact of digital fabrication, computation on contemporary furniture design]

Today we live in computational abundance in which our environment that surrounds us is filled with digital technologies. Therefore, the historical distinction between the digital and the non-digital becomes increasingly fuzzy. Post-digital represents a viewpoint on digital information technology in which the focus is no longer on technical innovation but eliminates the the distinction between digital and non-digital in theory and practice. Currently, digital becomes the way designers work. Moreover, designers are combining not only different technologies together but also they are combining traditional making techniques to achieve higher affect and promote a return to craftsmanship. It exemplifies an attitude is more concerned with humanization digital technologies than with being digital; it contextualizes design as a totality. Social, cultural, environmental, economical and artistic factors all becomes part of the discourse.

 By moving away from the comparative notion digital/non-digital, designers aim to focus on how the digital is actualized through various materialities. Design transcends mediation via a screen and locates itself in the physical world.  It becomes about modulation a system of variations with different forces and intensities to produce a heterogeneous form. In Deleuze (1993) own words: the “fluidity of matter, the elasticity of bodies and the motivating spirit as a mechanism” expresses “the active compressive forces exerted on matter,” with the result that “the motivating forces become the mechanism of matter”.

Additionally, designers aim to demonstrate that digital fabrication and craftsmanship are not mutually exclusive. Although the machines offer certain of accuracy and time management, in most cases that is not an important factor in the final product. In this approach, certain conceptual trends and aesthetics have arisen that transcend the novelty in and of itself. The use of digital technologies becomes one section of the larger image.

There are several ways in which post-digital designers are revolutionizing craftsmanship:

+      From designing the product to designing the system

Design is witnessing a shift from viewing it as a product to a system of interrelated relationships. Design is no longer the representation of physical elements as they relate to each other [ assembly or geometrical concerns], but rather it is a summation of forces and constrains that animate matter and actualize the system. It is an open system in an exchange of matter with its surrounding presenting import and export of data.  In this open system, following Aristotle’s Holism, the whole is more than the sum of the parts.  It is complex behavior-based system that can not be reduced to its parts nor to their summation.

For example, Joris Laarman from Makerchairs explored the role of parametric design and digital fabrication in addition to their relation to materials through a series of chairs that share the same shape but differ in the material system [ 5, 6]. Additionally, many other designers are currently investigating the relation between computation, digital fabrication and material by revisiting iconic designs such Charles Eames’s chairs in order to emphasis the process of making as the symbiosis of handcrafts , technology and material knowledge [7,8].

+      Design becomes a material practice

Designers are not producing drawings and just sending them for manufacturing. Designers are dedicated to the whole the process and not only the final product. According to Brandon Clifford and Wes McGee’s interdisciplinary design-build practice, Matter Design, “We’re not defining craft as time sanding a piece of wood. [It] is embedded in computation but also in how the material is processed. As you start to talk about materials, other logic—math, weight, structure, thermal condition—can be computed” [9,10,11,12].

+      Preserve designer’s intent

Machine and digital tools, such as industrial robots, become an extension of the hand not an abstracted tool. Accordingly, many ideas which were hard to achieved before now can be actualized without being redesigned for standardization and mass production.

Many ideas have been extremely difficult to create a decade ago, but now the most complicated structures can be actualized and open up design to unlimited possibilities. At the Bartlett school of architecture, group of students transformed the Panton chair into high complex structure. The digital model of the Panton chair was divided into three-dimensional pixels known as voxels. The pixels were then used to generate a pattern of curves that the robotic extruder can follow [12].

For many artists and designers, the post digital practice represents a rejection to the digital tropes of purity, pristine and perfection in favor of errors, glitches and artifacts. They embrace the imperfection of the digital tools i.e. digital craft and put perfection into doubt. In that sense, the digital tools can be perceived in equality with human designers. This imperfection can be seen either by building the gliched 3d digital model [13] or by preserving the imperfection of machine, especially while 3d-printing, as part of the formal expression [12, 14, 15, 16].

+      From computerize to computation: Use parametric modeling

Parametric modeling is essential in digital craft. The form is only a result to the system that controlled by global rules or parameters. This system allows a form, such as chair, to change size or thickness for instance while preserving its essence and maintaining the relationships between parts. Parametric modeling is used also to create repeated pattern or excessive operations to create an extraordinary affect.   

+      From mass production to mass customization

 The parameters of the parametric model allow any designed product to be unique. This provides an opportunity to satisfy the people’s design of wanting one-off. Products become unique to their needs, desires and identity.

+      From form making to Form finding

Design as material systems understands performance as a generative process. Therefore, instead of analyzing the performance of a design and modifying it according to the results, performance can directly modify designs digitally. By doing so, design shifts from form-making to form-finding through understanding form as a system with a specific behavior. In this process, form seeks equilibrium and optimal performance in a field of forces. These forces directly inform the architectural form where materials have dynamic and responsive properties. This allows for each individual component to be differentiated in response to specific requirements. A generic definition or a genotype maintains the system coherence and defines the bandwidth of variations for each component. Accordingly, design as a material system realizes performance as a set of generative logical forces that informs material’s distribution and provides a direct feedback to the configuration of form.    

 + Heterogeneity

Design based upon material properties and environmental conditions promotes customization through formal, structural and material heterogeneity. The practice holds implications for shifting design practice from homogeneous modular design driven by the logic of material assembly to heterogeneous differentiated design driven by material distribution. In this approach, matter is distributed where needed responding to its structural, environmental , social, cultural performances. Perhaps the most significant consequence of design that is informed by matter is the incorporation of difference or what Deleuze called "Difference in itself": gradients of structural and material effects emerge modulating their thickness, transparency, porosity and thermal absorption according to their assigned function or desired condition of stability (structure) and comfort (environmental conditions).     

  Heterogeneity is understood as both as a method and effect. For example, mixing oil painting with Photoshopping is a post-digital practice.  In today’s post-digital world of design, designers are using these methods to create expressions never before possible which range from sculptural fantasy to operative beauty. For instance, in furniture design, Studio Nucleo merges multiple materials such as old functional objects and new materials to question what we lose and what preserve through technological progress.
  

   

References and Further Readings 

Ahlquist, S. and A. Menges (2015). Materiality and Computational Design: Emerging Material Systems and the Role of Design Computation and Digital Fabrication. The Routledge companion for architecture design and practice: Established and emerging trends. M. Kanaani and D. A. Kopec. New York, Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group: 149–168.             

Al-Haddad, T. F. (2006). PerFORMance: Integrating Structural Feedback into Design Processes for Complex Surface-Active Form, Georgia Institute of Technology. Degree Master of Architecture in the College of Architecture.

 

Baerlecken, D., & Wright, K. B. (2014). Nominalized Matter: Agency of Material. International journal of architectural computing, 12(3), 339-356.

                

DeLanda, M. (2009). "Material evolvability and variability." Research & Design: The Architecture of Variation: 10-17.

                

Deleuze, G. (1953). "How do we recognize structuralism?" Desert islands and other texts 1974: 170-192.

                

Deleuze, G. (1993). The fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, U of Minnesota Press.

                

Deleuze, G. (1994). Difference and repetition, Columbia University Press.

                

Hensel, M. (2010). "Material systems and environmental dynamics feedback." Hensel M, Menges A, Weinstock M. Emergent technologies and design, towards a biological paradigm for architecture. Routledge.

                

Hensel, M. and A. Menges (2006). "Differentiation and performance: multi‐performance architectures and modulated environments." Architectural Design 76(2): 60-69.

Menges, A. (2010). "Material systems, computational morphogenesis and performative capacity." Emergent technologies and design. Routledge: 44-81.

                

Menges, A. (2013). "PERFORMATIVE MORPHOLOGY IN ARCHITECTURE." S A J.

                

Oxman, N. (2012). Material Computation. Manufacturing the Bespoke: Making and Prototyping Architecture. B. Sheil, John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

                

Oxman, N. and J. L. Rosenberg (2007). "Material-based Design Computation An Inquiry into Digital Simulation of Physical Material Properties as Design Generators." International journal of architectural computing 5(1): 25-44.

                

Oxman, R. (2006). "Theory and design in the first digital age." Design Studies 27: 229 - 265.

                

Pasnau, R. (2004). "Form, substance, and mechanism." The Philosophical Review 113(1): 31-88.

                

                

Spuybroek, L. (2009). Research & design: the architecture of variation: Thames & Hudson.

 

Vezina, B. (2007). "Universals and Particulars: Aristotle's Ontological Theory and Criticism of the Platonic Forms." Undergraduate Review 3(1): 101-103.

                

Willmann, J., et al. (2013). Digital by Material. Rob | Arch 2012: Robotic Fabrication in Architecture, Art, and Design. S. Brell-Çokcan and J. Braumann. Vienna, Springer Vienna: 12-27.

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