ABSTRACT
Tangible Landscape's real-time analytics enable designers to iterate rapidly through design ideas while rigorously testing their ideas. Landscape architects are beginning to assess and evaluate the performance the ecological function, the health of the plantings and soils, the integrity, and social benefits of built designs. With procedural modeling, landscape architects can use geomorphological and ecological processes to generate the form of the landscape. By changing the seeds or the parameters of a procedural architectural model, architects can computationally generate alternative forms and thus explore a greater number of formal variations on a design theme of greater complexity than would be possible using more typical analog or computer-aided design methods. Tangible Landscape encourages collaboration and interdisciplinary exchange as multiple users can shape a physical model simultaneously interacting, sharing knowledge, and designing together. To creatively design dynamic, evolving landscapes, landscape architects need to model processes and not just form, model intuitively and strive for a culture and poetics of openness.
