GENERATIVE DESIGN
by Celestino Soddu
more information on GENERATIVE DESIGN at www.generativedesign.com or at
www.celestinosoddu.com
Generative Design is a scientific Art process that identifies a genetic
code as the idea of artificial worlds.
The generative project is a concept-software that works producing three-dimensional
unique non-repeatable events as possible manifold expressions of the generating
idea identified as a subjective visionary proposal of a possible world.
This Idea / human creative act renders explicit and realizes an unpredictable
amazing endless expansion of human creativity. Computers are simply the
tools for its storage in memory and execution.
Designing this artificial genetic code was, for me, an enthusiastically
creative operation. I have found myself returning to the cultural approach
to Renaissance, capable of combining science with art. I have created ideas
formulating a harmony code that, as it is born of the history of man and his
relationship with nature, identifies and represents my subjective vision of
the possible, my imprinting as an architect. The code of harmony, like all
codes, contains some rules that trace certain forms of behaviour. Therefore
it is not a sequence, a database of events, of forms, but a definition of
behaviour patterns: the transformations from what exists into a possible visionary
world.
The design act changes from forming to transforming, because each form
is only one of many possible parallel results from an idea.
This approach suddenly opened the possibility of rediscovering possible
fields of human creativity that would be unthinkable without computer tools.
If these tools, at the beginning of the computer era, seemed to extinguish
human creativity, today they have become tools that open new fields enhancing
the understanding of creativity.
After 200 years of the old industrial era of necessarily cloned objects,
the one-of-a-kind object becomes an essential answer to the long-neglected
human need to live a world in which each environment, architecture and artificial
object mirrors the aura of uniqueness and unrepeatability of every person.
In an epoch marked by repeated attempts at the cloning of natural beings,
design returns in advanced technological fields such as nonlinear dynamic
systems to the notions of artificial life and artificial intelligence, the
aesthetic and ethical pleasure of rediscovering the processes and characters
of Nature. The pleasure is to identify and appreciate Identity and uniqueness.
With the generative approach to architecture and urban design it’s possible
to design visionary variations of the city’s identity. Identity is “how
to look at future” following a concept of the possible. Each generative
town design is a visionary representation of a city changing within its
evolutionary codes. The challenge is to design the city’s identity rediscovering
something like its artificial DNA, to be able to generate endless evolutionary
sequences of the city’s artificial life through increasing complexity processes.
The design and intelligent production.approach opens a new era in design
and industrial production: the challenge of a new naturalness of the industrial
object as a unique and unrepeatable event, a mirror of the uniqueness and
unrepeatability of man and nature. Once more man emulates Nature, as in
the act of making Art.
This genetic code of artificial ware, like DNA in nature, identifies not
only an object but also a species of objects. Industrial design will no
longer be the idea and realization of an object, but the idea of a species
of objects and its industrial generation.
The 3-D models produced using this approach are multiple endless results
of the same idea and can be directly utilized by industrial manufacturing
equipment, such as numerically controlled machines and robots, which already
represent the present technologies of industrial production. This generative
and automatic reprogramming device of robots makes it possible to produce
unique objects with the same equipment and with costs comparable to those
of objects that are cloned identical; like a printer that can produce pages
that are all the same or all different, at precisely the same cost.