FUTUTURE OF CAD End of Computer Aided Design
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As the era of using CAD as a tool to drive pre-computer paper based design process draws to a close, the type of CAD as we know today is likely to disappear . Unprecedented connectivity, cloud based computation, consumer creation, direct digital manufacturing, human behaviour modelling, altered business models and increasingly powerful game capabilities in devices is set to dramatically change not only CAD but the creation process itself towards genetically based design processes.
Introduction We speculate here that most design work in future will be about modifying and extending genetic models of design. These models will be socially authored and be made available for end user play through browser platforms supported by simulation engines and hosted APIS’s services. Manufacturing and construction companies will encode their services through such models in order to promote their services. These models will share the informational, self-organizational and evolutionary characteristics of cells. The role of designers would be in orchestrating this self-organizing process according to higher level intents that are beyond the reach of computational processes. But before we launch our journey of speculation, I like to clarify here what we mean by ‘design’. Many are not aware that the vast majority of what is built and made is not designed by designers. They have evolved thought the efforts and experiments of thousands of people unknown to us. But we rarely use the words ‘evolved’ when we refer to buildings or things. We remain unable to wean ourselves of our belief in our selves; of individual human ingenuity - our unique ability to create something out of our minds. But in Nature’s books there is in fact nothing called design. Nature demonstrates that it is possible to create without designing objects of immense complexity in the known universe – such as the human brain. So we choose to discuss here the future of CAD in the context of ‘creation ‘– ignoring both the obsession of designers to design and the blindness of most design theorist to natures creative processes. We replace without apology ‘design’ with ‘creation’. It is only then we will begin to see the radical changes that are unfolding in front of us.
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Design in connected environments? A good place to look for clues – is in the design of web pages; for the design of buildings will follow suite. Here are some of its characteristics:
Separation of Content and Style (Style Sheets can be applied on content) Self-Organizing Content (displayable in various devices) Primacy of end user experience and the use of analytics to optimize it Use of templates and the diversity it brings about making it easy for non-experts to create high quality designs (e.g. blogs templates) Open source initiatives being the driving force of key developments Connectivity to unlimited computational resources (Cloud Computing)
The web has radically transformed the way we create and consume information. We are witnessing the same is happening to design. Design has become just another form of digital ‘content’; floating freely in the information universe. Like all another form if digital content, it is now sharable, mashable and with digital manufacturing – also makeable. The separation of the Content and Style in architecture would mean that we can stylize an architectural layout just as easily as we can change the style of our blog – retaining the same content while making significant changes to its appearance just by applying a different style template. In architecture, style template may include geometric and material changes. Layout and circulation patterns may be maintained while the geometry (what we see as design) is radically changed. Self-organizing in architecture would mean the ability for the design to adjust itself, just as web pages self-adjust to various screen sizes, display resolutions and device types. Similarly, architectural designs too, may adjust themselves to various plot shapes, sizes and a host of other requirements and constrains. The primacy of user experience means – the design ideology embraced by companies like Apple Inc. to create outstanding end user experiences, while their competitors (many of whom are who are no more) focused on designing objects often to suite the whims, fancies and egos of designers. The much publicized efforts of star architects to inflict their notion of design on end users who have virtually have no say in the design process may not be regarded in the future as the best way to design.
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If we are to adapt a participatory notion of design, would creativity be compromised? The common fear harboured by designers is that it would be, as much as photographers feared the introduction of high quality digital cameras in the hands of the untrained. Most architects believe that they should avoid template based designs and think instead on a clean sheet of paper, ignoring the fact that their thoughts are polluted, influenced and seeded by all what they have seen and know. They would like to believe that what they are creating unique masterpieces that have nothing in common with what is out there – despite all evidence pointing to the contrary. This is because design as we know it is about differentiation. Template based design for them, is something to be loathed.
A look at the diversity of life forms around us and the diversity of blog and tem- plate based web sites should convince us of the creative reach of template based design. In both cases, the templates themselves are open to evolution creating an ever expanding diversity of design possibilities. The templates that the architects know of are of a rudimentary kind and as limiting as they wish them to be. Genes are templates too, operating with infinite sophistication orchestrating the various stages of development creating infinitely diverse life forms – all based on shared templates, but not of the geometric kind.
Design in an Evolutionary Environment? Design will be – what it always was for billions of years, except for a brief blip in human development where a few champions of design emerged. They called their creations ‘designs’ – to differentiate it from Gods creations. It took Darwin to figure out that “Autonomous Creation” has been in business from the time that life began. Much latter, we discovered genes and their roles in refining the act of creation through the use of code. We are likely to return to that older way of creating, by getting on with making without designing as practiced by nature.
Here are some of the characteristics of the biological creation process:
A collective activity based on the actions of individual units The code of creation embedded into the unit of creation This code manages the development process rather than the end design 4
Decision making is divested to the smallest individual element Random variations are formed due to tweaks of the developmental code to extend the range of design possibilities Continuous variation – with families and branches in the form of evolutionary tree Proliferation of successful bits of code that create the overall success of the organ, organism and ecosystem. Post creation self-design capabilities through growth and repair
Nature’s way of creation may be operable in a web based eco system. Let us imagine the smallest cellular unit, a brick to have autonomous pre-programed behaviour. It would have developmental stages; perhaps it will start of as a blob. It would arrange itself appropriately throughout the developmental stages of the design, reduce and enlarge in numbers as and when needed, decide on its own structural and thermal properties. In addition it would source itself economically from available suppliers. In short, each element will have capacity like living cells to self-organize itself within an overall scheme based on built-in instructions. The code that gives rise to its behaviour would be based on previous successful outcomes, but may be coaxed by the human designers to form designs that are in alignment with human intentions, perhaps introduced though templates where some of its development may be synthetically guided as in synthetic biology where organism are coaxed to produce bio pharmaceutical products. Aspects of self-organization are likely to replace construction planning. Contractual procedures are likely to be automated as in online stock trading, where bidders and sellers are represented by programs that make legally binding transactional decisions. Nature has no idea of what it is doing; for It has no intension. Therefore it does not design. Design as we know it is about realizing human intentions. If there is no intension it cannot be called design. What appears to be design just happens in nature and that too in very different ways to the ways that we are used to. Creation happens in nature. It happens through sophisticated build procedures. It would be correct to say that nature builds – but that too without intension. If there is any intention at all, it is the intention of genetic code to replicate itself; for if it does not carry such intension then it would seize to exist. So nature is a dynamic created by bits of code that can continuously reproduce: it is that simple. Nature demonstrates the ability of code to transforms the material world into that with enormous complexity – that which we call life. This code is not only made with materials, it can organize itself, replicate itself, absorb energies of the environment to create more of itself; more importantly it can 5
continuously evolve and make improvements to itself to explore the entire regions of design space which is continuously transforms by its very existence in ways that are truly amazing.
Design in the era of consumer creation? Buildings are beginning to be artefacts of manufacture, assembled on site with increased machine use and with minimal labour. In this context, it is worth looking at what is happening in manufacturing for it will surely be seen in buildings. We live in an era where mass manufacturing is being replaced by mass customization. Within this transformation, manufactures are competing with each other to be able to manufacture custom items of great complexity at mass manufacturing prices. The design and manufacturing processes of these companies are entirely digital, enabling their CNC machines to fulfill consumer wishes. Those companies that do this well will survive and thrive on the edge of new possibilities. So what does this bring to design?
From top down design to Participatory Design Embedding knowledge within CAD models Light weight interactive web representations of complex CAD designs Easy to use design interfaces Design in a connected environment
Every sector of consumer industry is seeking to engage consumers in the best way they can – removing the intermediaries who pre-judge their choice: marketeers and whether we like it or not - designers fall into this category. Consumer creation is the new mantra that is spawning a host of technologies and web services – to endow the consumer with the power to create what they wish. Currently, this happens in very limited way in most industries due to various complications. But 3D printing is making it so much easier. The design tools for consumer creation are appearing on tablets and are of a different kind. No more tedious menus. No more the requirements for design abilities. Intelligent design frame works are now allowing non-designers to design. This will be the norm. Genetic Modelling will take this to the next level allowing the creation of unprecedented variations within bounds of performance, cost and manufacturability. At the same time, a good part of CAD will revert back to what it was originally created for – controlling machines for manufacture. The companies that control the making will provide the genetic templates for component design. Those who make things know most about what they make. They will play a pivotal role in structuring that information in a genetic format so that they can let them loose on the web for end user play – the hope that they will benefit from the orders that arise.
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For this scenario to materialize (ignoring its merits and de-merits for now) there has to be sufficient demand and demonstrable advantages. Many challenges have yet to be overcome. The demand for this will not arise from architectural practices but from market forces driven by the consumer creation phenomena. Configuration Systems already prevalent in the manufacturing industry is being to serve the more complex demands of consumer creators. Genetic models will extend this capacity beyond preconfigured offerings.
What will CAD be? It took about a decade for the program written to control CNC machines to be known as CAD. It took another few decades for it to move from paper based 2D representations to 3D and a decade more to information Models (BIM). But these models are based on parametric representations that are limited in expression (in other words they occupy small regions in design space). Genetic Models on the other hand , control build procedures , enabling far greater range of geometric exploration ( occupying a much larger region in design space). In addition, Genetic Models would be able to work within constraint envelopes set by a manufacturing, cost, environmental, engineering and types of performative constrains. Genetic representation of design would be about extending BIM with richer informational content and expressive and constraint management capabilities in way the components can self-designs – within an overall framework managed by the designer. We call this Genetic Modelling. We may see this as an extension of BIM where the parametric model is replaced by procedural models operating within constrain envelopes exhibiting intelligent behaviour. Future CAD systems will be web based and most of it will run web browsers calling web hosted API’s to support more complex operations. While late stage designs generally deal with large amounts of data requiring massive amount of computational capacity early stage design will not. Current HTML5 capabilities are ample for early stage design exploration. Currently there are also a few attempts at building browser based CAD systems. CAD companies will offer cloud based API services – that will operate on genetically structured models (software as a service model). APIs will keep design on the browser light and easy, relieving them of the computational burden that current PC based systems struggle with giving them instead the ability to call upon computational capacity as and when needed.
What will the designer be? To answer this, we need to ask a bigger question What would design be - in a richly connected computational medium, with free floating genetic design material ? It will be more about searching for prospective solutions that are feasible and desirable. It will be about enabling the client to experience different possibilities and understand the various limitation and their effects. Computationally, it will be about enlarging the creative exploration space. 7
When the burden of design is carried by computation, the designers role will be mostly about intent management. Designers are likely to extend and modify genetic structures as biologists do with living cells, to achieve objectives that are different to what they were initially evolved for. Like them, they would accept the current frame work of biological material and tweak individual aspects instead of redesign the cell every single time as architects do with buildings now. Their role will increasing be more about “purpose” – that is beyond the reach of computation. Avoiding the details of implementation, Let us imagine how this may work on a simple house building project.
When Joe wants to design his house If Joe is part of 95% percentile, he will not be going first to an architect. He will explore within the constraints of his site, budget and building regulations, using various web deployed house forms made available by contractors. He will be able to walk through and around them and be able to explore possible design options. He will be using a free browser based system populated with socially authored genetic models. Unknown to him contractors and suppliers will be involved in an online bidding war to give him the best deals as he continues to explore possibilities. All contractual, logistics and fabrication aspects will be computed in real time, possibly with various contractors bidding online for various aspects of the job. He will be informed of the cost of the building and that of changes that he makes as he is making them. Of course, his design will be made from a kit of parts – as most houses are. API’s will provide advanced computational services required for design on a pay per use basis. When Joe requires assistance he will most probably source that online from a list of professionals specializing in various aspects of the design, construction and taste. In fact Joe will not be “designing”. He will be building his wish in a virtual environment in a system that is supported by multiple product and service companies. They will do all this free of charge just for the opportunity, to provide their services. This is not entirely a futurist scenario; this is simply an extension of what is already happening.
Beyond CAD While CAD is good at representing design, it is poorly structured for creating them. In its current form, CAD is struggling to adapt itself to early stage design. The in- creasing use of slider bars is a signs of designers coming to terms with variability of a very limited kind. CAD in its current form lacks genetic structures that are capable of capturing commonalties (though BIM is a good start). It is only able to represent design information in geometric and material form operating at a very low level. At the highest level of the design process is the description of design intent which CAD is in its cur- rent form is unable to support. There is much work to be done here and the challenge for computational design is to connect the two extreme ends; the intent with suitable design representations. 8
The greatest disadvantage of the lack of genetic structures is the inability to compile knowledge about design. Every designer starts off with a clean sheet of paper as though no piece of architecture existed before. Many designers (especially star architects) see creating differentiations as their primarily role. In doing so, they commit not to learn from the work, expertise and experiments of others. Knowledge consolidation requires common data structures. For example if we knew of desirable configuration of rooms within a house for optimal thermal comfort (at a higher level, above CAD presentation of the design) analysed from various house forms in a particular region, this knowledge can be applied during the design process at a very high level if all the houses share a common genetic layout structure. While CAD representations allow us to analyse the performative aspects of designs they do not facilitate the embedding of knowledge within the design process. The design knowledge is housed in the designers head and it is not shared with other designer’s. Genetic representation of design will change this.
Conclusion CAD will evolve to engage end users in design play, through the deployment of creation of product avatars (light weight design representations) made available by manufacturing companies in a way that constrains can be managed and intelligence can be embedded. The end user play will happen in highly connected enabling environments capable of managing genetic representations. Manufacturing and construction companies will be reliant on such platforms for creating, managing, marketing and delivering their services giving end user’s maximum freedom while ensuring their manufacturability/constructability. These genetic representations can be acted upon by search engines, constrain engines or analytical engines, guiding the end user towards viable solutions while educating them on the pros and cons of various design options greatly improving design decisions over current methods. In this scenario designers and engineers will become co-creators extending the promise of what is possible and desirable in ways that will surprise us.
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