How can we characterize the promulgation of computing in design? At the outset, computing was conceived predominantly in terms of design automation. It was quickly realized that this medium offered a great deal more than automation, and computing rapidly become a mode of conception for designing. At the juncture of art, design, and computing, however, we recognize computing as becoming loaded with cultural meanings that are enacted through designed works, and designed works that reinterpret a range of assumptions about computing. Design and computing are intervening and lending each other ever-accruing layers of possibilities. The arena of design and computing is producing a new object of knowledge from which they effect: a mode of inquiry, a form of critique, a constitution of practices of subjectivities, and an articulation of objective and subjective investigations. The four papers selected for publication in this Special Issue triangulate these perspectives, providing a new vision for the direction of design and computing and emerging research themes.

This paper describes research carried out to develop a parametric urban shape grammar for the Zaouiat Lakhdar quarter of the Medina of Marrakech in Morocco. The goal is to create the basis for a system that could capture some features of the existing urban fabric and apply them in contemporary urban planning and architectural design. The methodology used is described, from the initial historical analysis and fieldwork to the identification of three subgrammars necessary to encode the complexity of the urban preexistences: the urban grammar, the negotiation grammar, and the housing grammar. Top-down and bottom-up approaches to grammar design are analyzed and compared. The bottom-up urban grammar developed is then described, and a hand derivation of the existing urban fabric is proposed. Visual, symbolic, and tagged computer implementations of shape grammars are briefly discussed and a novel design generated by the tagged interpreter is presented.

Structural optimization is usually handled by iterative methods requiring repeated samples of a physics-based model, but this process can be computationally demanding. Given a set of previously optimized structures of the same topology, this paper uses inductive learning to replace this optimization process entirely by deriving a function that directly maps any given load to an optimal geometry. A support vector machine is trained to determine the optimal geometry of individual modules of a space frame structure given a specified load condition. Structures produced by learning are compared against those found by a standard gradient descent optimization, both as individual modules and then as a composite structure. The primary motivation for this is speed, and results show the process is highly efficient for cases in which similar optimizations must be performed repeatedly. The function learned by the algorithm can approximate the result of optimization very closely after sufficient training, and has also been found effective at generalizing the underlying optima to produce structures that perform better than those found by standard iterative methods.

This paper explores using Shannon's entropy of information to measure linkographs of 12 design sessions that involved six architects in two different experimental conditions. The aim is to find a quantitative tool to interpret the linkographs. This study examines if the differences in the design processes and the design outcomes can be reflected in the entropic interpretations. The results show that the overall entropy of one design condition is slightly higher than the other. Further, there are indications that the change of entropy might reflect design outcomes.

This paper presents how the function–behavior–structure (FBS) ontology can be used to represent processes despite its original focus on representing objects. The FBS ontology provides a uniform framework for classifying processes, and includes higher level semantics in their representation. We show that this ontology supports a situated view of processes based on a model of three interacting worlds. The situated FBS framework is then used to describe the situated design of processes.