ABSTRACT
‘Emergent Technologies and Design’ is more than the name of our academic programme at the Architectural Association. It nominates a very specific interdisciplinary approach to design that is embedded in technological development and design innovation. The programme might also have been titled ‘Emergence, Technology and Design’ or perhaps ‘Biology, Technology and Design’. While the programme title does acknowledge the importance of new technologies, it also emphasises the key concepts of emergence in relation to design. Emergence is a new science, a new field that has initiated a significant change in the culture of architecture. To engage with emergence requires more than the development of a catalogue of new materials that are coupled to innovative production technologies; it requires an understanding of the behaviour of complex systems and the mathematics of their processes, and of the systematic transference of that knowledge to design and production. Emergence is a consolidation of a profound change in knowledge and materialisation that has made significant changes to science and technology, and to the way in which we think of architecture and the way we produce it. Emergence provides an explanation of how natural systems have evolved and maintained themselves, and a set of models and processes for the design and fabrication of architectural forms that exhibit complex behaviour, and perhaps even real intelligence. Emergence has radically transformed the frontiers of science, mathematics and industry in recent decades, and it is central to a way of design across many fields that is rapidly making obsolete what was once a strict distinction between design and production. The set of available analytical instruments that are commonly used in architectural and engineering design have undergone substantial recent development, and are increasingly incorporating temporal parameters such as lifespans and generations. New design software enables the writing of scripts and codes, that when coupled to simulations of dynamic structural and environmental loads have the potential to extend design processes from the development and fabrication of a singular static artefact or building to families of variant forms that can respond to varying conditions. Computationally driven design and production processes are enabling the fabrication of the complex forms and materials of almost all of the products of the contemporary world that we use in our daily lives, the complex geometries of many contemporary buildings, and the complex topologies of infrastructural and information networks. Emergence demands new strategies for design, strategies that are derived from the evolutionary development of living systems, from their material properties and metabolisms, and from their adaptive response to changes in their environment. Natural systems analysis: water lily <italic>Victoria amazonica</italic>. The leaf of the giant water lily, which supposedly inspired the structure of Paxton's Crystal Palace, was investigated in regard to its structural performance and buoyancy resulting from the network of air-filled ribs on the leaf's underside. The digital model includes the leaf's morphology and material information such as the stiffness of the plant fibres and fibre orientation. Using finite element analysis (FEA), different loading scenarios were investigated, applying a distributed pressure over the surface of the structure as well as applying forces directly to discrete positions on the structure. EmTech Natural Systems Module, Pablo Cabrera, Efrat Cohen and Thomas von Girsewald, 2005. https://s3-euw1-ap-pe-df-pch-content-public-p.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/9781315881294/8c633402-ec95-4ecb-990e-cc99cb482b6f/content/figI_1_C.jpg" xmlns:xlink="https://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"/>
