Exchanging design knowledge with computers

Computers can actually play several quite different roles in the design process and it is around these roles that we shall base the start of our exploration here. It is interesting that the earliest attempts to use computers in the design process were actually very much more ambitious than we would even contemplate today. Not surprisingly their success was very limited as we shall see for reasons we now understand. Perhaps the biggest disappointment in this field is the still rather limited success in getting computers actually to assist in the real business of design as opposed to performing relatively menial supporting tasks. The history of technology is one of the amplification of human capabilities. Mechanical devices have amplified our strength to lift and move objects including ourselves. Optical devices have amplified our ability to see either further as with the telescope or in more detail as with the microscope. Biotechnology has amplified our control over nature in order to feed or heal ourselves. Computing technology has amplified our cognitive abilities to store and recall information and to process it more speedily. This is certainly true for computer-aided drawing. We can now store and manipulate graphical information in the design drawing office at rates that were unimaginable only a couple of decades ago. The other great potential the computer has appeared to offer us is the ability to support our cognitive and creative processes. However, by comparison the potential of the computer to aid creative thought in design has proved more difficult to realize and remains a largely ephemeral mirage (Lawson, 2002a). Many claims have been made by the industry for software that was then only used for relatively short periods of time by enthusiasts. Why The first serious attempts at computeraided design positioned the computer as oracle or font of wisdom. In this role the computer actually produces a design proposition. An early example would be a program to design single storey building layouts by optimizing circulation patterns (Whitehead and Eldars, 1964). Boyd Augers program for designing housing layouts maximizing sunlight, view and privacy offers another such example (Auger, 1972). Strathclyde Universitys programs designed layouts for schools given a timetable of classes. These programs actually proposed designs with the human designer relegated to the support role of resolving, tidying and rationalizing after the computer had proposed the main ideas. The assumption was that somehow the computer designed propositions would be arrived at more quickly, with less effort and be more optimal than those achieved by human designers. When this was investigated by Nigel Cross (1977) he found that while on average the Whitehead and Eldars program was indeed slightly better at optimizing circulation than human designers, the best architect beat the computer. It is probably the case that today we might have even better algorithms for such problems so if the program were to be rewritten now it is possible that it might be better than the best architect just as the latest chess playing programs can now beat grand masters. More recently this role has had a reprise with other kinds of programs that also design in extremely limited ways. Many researchers have published proto-software of this kind based on the idea of geometrical rules such as shape grammars (Mitchell, 1979). In such software the computer uses rules which are either implicit or sometimes explicit in existing designs to produce new variants based upon these organizational constraints. John Frazer has for many years worked with a set of ideas which

involve computers generating families of solutions from such sets of rules. In the early days this required the designer to give the computer some limited piece of form as a sort of conceptual seed. The computer would then cultivate this seed through standard transformations such as stretching, rotating and the like. These mutations of the original idea could then be presented back to the designer as a sort of source book of ideas. Architectural concepts are expressed as generative rules so that their evolution can be accelerated and tested. The rules are described in a genetic language which produces a code-script of instructions for form generation. Computer models are then evaluated on the basis of their performance in a simulated environment. Very large numbers of evolutionary steps can be generated in a short space of time, and the emergent forms are often unexpected. Here the computer is designing in a way which is in theory predictable but in practice may be quite unexpected and thus apparently creative. Even the author of the program who may have some rough idea what it will do may still be surprised by it in much the same way we may be surprised by another human member of a design team. At the moment these ideas are really research tools and whether they will progress into tools used as part of an everyday design process remains uncertain. However, so far there is little sign of any widespread use of such ideas for actually designing. So this idea of the computer as oracle or font of wisdom has so far proved to be something of a mirage. In fact this is by far the most ambitious of all the roles that computers have been forecast to play in design. If we examine this role in terms of its fundamental characteristics then one argument would suggest we shall never be able to realize this vision of a computer actually designing. Design of the kind we have been studying in this book could be seen as one of the most intellectually demanding types of thinking. It involves both procedural and declarative knowledge. It relies heavily on experience and common sense. These are issues that we shall explore more thoroughly in the following chapters. The idea that a computer could be programmed to perform this range of cognitive tasks has been promoted by the field of Artificial Intelligence.