While urban structures act like ecologies, developing interdependent relations across diverse scales, all too often the design tools applied at the urban scale (ie planning) limit themselves to a series of top-down decisions, with a single decisional direction spanning concentric scales. The aim of the workshop is to explore a shift in the design paradigm, from the planning of urban criteria and parameters, to the design of behaviors able to operate in information rich environments, finally allowing to build urban structures from the bottom up. Starting from pervasive data maps, the operational substrate, participants will design basic behaviors for a multi-agent based system able to grow building coherent compounds, which are not only responsive geometries, but are constantly assessed by an internal feedback system. The general aim is to design an ecology of mutual negotiation strategies between agents and the environment, thus re-thinking the hierarchies at work on the urban scale. In this sense scale itself is not just understood as extensive metric size, but rather the detection of certain system behaviors. Using detail as the form of procedural information [1], the workshop outcome will span several scales, the definition of the system detail being decisive and propagative in its influence on the system’s growth, shape and performance.
- introduction to agency (lecture)
- first approach to behavior-based protocols in Grasshopper
- environmental data implementation
- flocking and stigmergy 1/2
- flocking and stigmergy 2/2
- generation process
- generative urban morphologies
- generative urban patterns
- generative urban apparatus
- tutorized work + personal development
- tutorized work + personal development
- tutorized work + personal development
- presentation
- final party
All participants should be equipped with their own laptop and, besides the latest version of Rhinoceros 3D and Grasshopper (Windows only), be sure to have also installed the latest version of the following plugins:
- 4D Noise
- Anemone
- Boids
- Cocoon
- Heteroptera
- Human
- Human UI
- LadyBug + HoneyBee
- Mesh Tools
- Sandbox Topology
- Shortest Walk
(suggestions: Tree8, LunchBox - I'll also share a bunch of user objects I have)
The workshop code is organized in topic-based folders. The current code (and the info in this file) will be updated and integrated as the workshop unfolds.
WIP folder - tentative code and stuff goes here
Some bits and hints of reading for both a theoretical and practical contextualization of the computational strategies developed.