Computational design: the project is outside or inside us?

The scientificity dictated by mathematical processes that are the basis of computational design is, without doubt, very attractive. But the questions that immediately arise are: “are we able to control the design process? The critical thinking, which is the basis of our profession and it’s subjected to this type of design process, how it comes out? “

Any particular technology or technique is — and must be — by its very nature, only a tool to get the project and not the project itself, a tool to overcome obstacles. In this sense, the development of computational design has opened great debates on the limits that these technologies can cause to designers. About that, Stefanescu in his essay “Relinquishing Control: Reaction to Emergence”, mentioning Graafland, emphasizes the theoretical and practical gaps within the computational world: “The computational universe turns dangerous when it stops being a useful heuristic device and transforms itself into an ideology that privileges information over everything else”.

He continues, then, underlining how this computational universe has led to a design process dominated by the information / data and adds: “An algorithm left by itself is completely inert in the absence of input”.

Quite often the design process is filled with “objective” algorithms that have nothing to do with the human dimension. Are not taken into account the fact that “sensorial capacities and precision limitations have always been a driving force of urbanism and architecture”.

We can not give up control. I firmly believe in the need of critical imagination (of designers), the same imagination mentioned by Carlos Martí Arís in “Las Variaciones de La Identidad”, where he speaks about the dichotomy between science and art, in particular about the “method of testing and elimination of errors” di K.R. Popper, that joins these two big fields of knowledge.

This method consists in trying to solve problems through formulation of conjectures, which are submitted to critical discussion. “The results of any search can not be derived mechanically or instrumentally from the data that it manipulates. Every scientific formulation is a creative act, it involves an interpretation and it requires a personal stance”.

And here, finally, I associate with what was initially said. The result of our research, that is the design project, can not be the result of a mechanical “putting together” data. Our sensorial capacities have to be, as states Stefanescu, a driving force that, with the possible usable tools, leads to the creative act.