C.Soddu, E.Colabella
Artificial intelligence and Architectural Design

THE EMULATION OF DESIGN PROCEDURES

A tool that operates in the field of design processes needs to construct, with algorithms, a set of logical procedures that are, in practice, the logical procedures of discovery. These procedures are not analytical.
They are like the epistemological structure of scientific discovery.
To use information technologies in the architectural design we need to have a software able to simulate the increasing complexity of the system in front of the progressive stratification of ever different and not necessarily coherent approaches.
The software we have developed, Basilica, is an intelligent interface between the designer and the project. It helps the architect using a controllable and changeable logical sequence of morphogenesis. Following the selected approach, the tool can generate a set of different formalised scenarios in response to the progressive multiplicity of questions.
Every generated scenario needs to be a different and clearly characterised one. This is because the design procedure is a developing path. In order to simulate it, Basilica uses a nonlinear, unpredictable, and increasingly complex sequence. Using this approach, Basilica can generate a sequence of possible scenarios that can reply not only to the pre-coded questions, but also to the unpredictable conceptual needs of the architect.
The algorithms of this software are not organised with a shaped data base, and do not refer to a deductive request/reply structure. This is because in the design processes, every formalised reply exceeds the field of pertinence of the request. The architects use the random margins between requests and formalised replies to answer to their conceptual needs, to perform their idea of the architecture. The role of these algorithms is to simulate the human procedure of design evolution, of discovering the possible fields and, in the same moment, replying in advance to the unknown and unpredictable answers with a set of possible virtual scenarios.
In other words Basilica simulates the logical design procedures shaped as a formalising engine that changes every answer into possible choices using a formal matrix. During every cycle, the developing project system gets to an increasingly complex level. As it normally happens during any design process, the software changes what before was random into what after is necessary, because it has just happened.
For this reason we assimilate this algorithmic procedures to the inferential procedures of AI. So we can manage, evaluate and control the increasing complexity and adaptivity of the project, that is the increasing of power to get out intersubjective replies through the explicit stratification of a sequence of subjective contributions.
Last review 02 December 1995
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