Joyless Generative Designers
I just read a chapter of The Velvet Rage about passion. Dr Alan Downs reveals that you do things in life either because of validation or joy. I piece together a nice outfit every morning because I want to receive compliments later. It is useless to think like an old fashioned British and tell me that dressing nice is a way to show respect to others. It is all about the validation. And I surely will tailor my outfit to maximise the compliments, the validation.
I just opened the statistics Medium shows on my first-ever-article. What strikes me are the metrics it uses: count of readers and the “engagement” of those readers. It measures how much time readers spent reading my article. No time spent so far by anyone! But the underbelly is that Medium suggests I can tweak my writing to increase the engagement. Data at the service of clicks, time spent, and ultimately validation.
How can I do something because the joy it gives me just for doing it and not for the validation I might receive? Data these days is at the service of maximising stuff. Engagement, validation, efficiency.
Here comes the oddball: design is joy, pure joy. The joy of creating, inventing, discovering new ways of making things, pushing our limits, crossing boundaries, being amazed. It is art. Art that uses technique o engineering to keep pushing those boundaries. That’s design.
But when things are engineered via data to improve validation, then design is joyless. If the premise is to maximise the ammount of apartments with suficient areas, solar exposure, daylight, thermal comfort, I see less and less joy. That is simply efficiency.
Generative Design is not new. Artists and designers started using genetic algorithms as a way to explore and discover. Back in the 90s Brian Eno let his genetic algorithm run for a while and then select the most interesting bits. Very time consuming, but the joy relied on the discovery, not on the pursue of the optimal. Computational architecture (or Parametricism as Patrik would call it), was born also in the 90s with the idea of erasing the author from the design. Designers were looking after an autonomous architecture. A thing that would be what it needed to be, with no author. It was quite literally about letting design loose to be itself. The result would be novelty. The joy resided in writing the rules and constraints to form this design. Finding data, exploring the conditions of a site, indexing, unearthing data to inform the design. No style. Just data forming a building. Flows were a common source of data to achieve this. But remedial techniques from landscape design would also come handy. By the use of computers, scripting or parametrics, all this data would become form. The joy came from discovering the relevant and unique data to the project at hand (quite different approach from just selecting data to comply with or gain LEED points). The joy came from setting the game up and from seeing an autonomous building come to fruition.
Validation was not the main goal for these designers. Yokohama International Port Terminal was not understood by the first journalists that saw it. It was certainly not a nice outfit engineered to maximise engagement. Farshid and Alejandro tried hard to share their joy by explaining the data they had used and the rules they had set for the building to form.
The current wave of Generative Designers (Spacemaker, Finch, Testfit) is not after design, neither after joy. Dr Alan Downs says that when we find joy at doing something, we find our passion. Surely, it is possible to find joy and thus passion while using generative tools. But data-validation can rob us from joy and ultimately from passion, that is, from design.
This is my first and soft attempt to discuss the implications of the current main stream use of generative design. There are political, philosophical and social aspects that need to be adressed as well. For example, the occultation of production by means of outward appearance of the product, as Marx put it, or “conditions of labour concealed so that the products of these can appear in the commodity form, as fetishized objects of consumption.”, as put by Douglas Spencer in his The Architecture of Neoliberalism. Another aspect is the forsaking of a proper ecological engagement with urbanism in favour of a human centric design. Object Oriented Philosophy and Speculative Realism are handy to discuss this shortsightedness in the recent wave of Generative Designers. Finally, a political aspect to be adressed is the disengagement of the local governments in the production of the current urban generative tools: the Neoliberal idea that governments should stay hands-off of markets, in this case, of development and exploitation of urban plots.
