n.formations - An Atlas of Experiments in Materialized Information

Since the digital age, how we design has become as important as what we design. Never before there have been so many different techniques at our disposal, many of them with the ability to cross previously imagined frontiers. During the 20th century efforts to rethink habitual practice of the design process are accompanying the process itself. Our research focuses on the dissection, documentation, and reinterpretation of contemporary digital production practice by means of serial experiments and platforms of new media. An interactive atlas of correlated aesthetics, entities and formulations shall contribute to the growing community of open source design practitioners and makers in the digital chain. The role of the model as an immediate source of physical and emotional feedback shifts from the analogue to the digital realm. Today, designing characterizes itself rather by manipulating digital systems than determined articulation. Parametric modeling and open systems allow a simple formulation of intricate generative processes, though a models ability to adapt to changes is limited by its own complexity. There is a desire to be designing with systems of simple rules, which are able to temporarily stabilize but stay open to changes of any kind, to be capable of reflecting any unforeseen state. Modern parametric modeling bears great potential in the research of novel interfaces, representations, their flexibility, and the theoretically unlimited pool of formal languages waiting to be described. We want to fundamentally question the ways in which parametric design platforms are used, to produce original modes of operation. Artifacts of contemporary design and architecture serve as samples for an elementary decomposition and strategic reconstruction, where smart representation will foster flexibility and persistence of a model until its physical manifestation. The galore experiment of gestalt to digital to analogue here serves as means for synthesized innovation to establish a knowledge base of components, forms, formulations and dependencies. Open source and plug-in tools are about to establish a new collaborative design society, where the seed of new methods and profound reflection of the existing is greatly needed. Beyond local prototypes, an open-ended result of this project is envisaged in the atlas as an online platform; gathering, relating, rendering an artifact of parametric designs dissected information, logics of aesthetics, subsystems and fragments for the public.

nformations is an arts-based research project which in architectural design is dealing with the question of How besides the question of What. Borders of existing imagination and contemporary technologies in parametric design have been tested and challenged by a series of experiments in order to advance habitual designing practice. Primary goal has been being able to direct complex formations based on few parameters instead of modelling every ever so detailed geometric shape step by step. Thus dynamic systems which follow simple rules have been programmed being able to self-organize geometrically. It turned out that being open to react on any modification or change and produce unforseen shapes or conditions is the most significant quality of generative systems. Parametric modelling and generative processes allow describing open systems, whereas the ability of models of adopting modifications is depending on the complexity of its body of rules. This methodological strategy of designing characterizes itself more by manipulating and setting up digital systems than by deterministic articulation. Based on an analytic part of the research project which focused on dissecting and documentation of habitual strategies of digital design priorities of further development of methods and tools have been set. Within an experimental series of Gestalt to Digital to Analog which served as innovation-synthesis a knowledge platform of shapes, structures, formulations and interdependencies has been created. Geometric structures which have evolved during the research project have been documented as 3D printed samples, their digital process of formation has been recorded as short animations. Methods and systematic processes which have been able to describe generically have been conceived as open source program samples and plugins in order to contribute to the development and exchange of our cooperative design community. An interactive atlas map which allows virtually exploring related structures and systems has been developed.