Abstract
This article develops a framework for analysing how digital software and models become mediums for creative imagination in architectural design. To understand the hermeneutics of these relationships, we develop key concepts from Material Engagement Theory (MET) and Postphenomenology (PP). To push these frameworks into the realm of digital design, we develop the concept of Digital Materiality. Digital Materiality describes the way successive layers of mathematics, code, and software come to mediate enactive perception, and the possibilities of creative material engagement actualised in work with software. Just as molecular materials come to transform action with material objects, so digital materiality comes to enable and transform creative practices with computers. Digital architectural design form a new space for ongoing enactive discovery and creativity through manipulation of digital models and their underlying software environments. By shifting relationships within their digital models, architects can direct their attention, intention, and imagination towards widely different aspects of the model. Here, creative imagination becomes a fundamentally situated activity where mind emerges through dynamic interaction between a variety of embodied, material, and cultural domains.
Highlights
In contemporary architecture, computational tools let designers build intricate digital models where geometry translates to data, and data to geometry
The emergence of digital architectural design raises a number of questions for the hermeneutics of technology as digital tools introduce new computational possibilities for creation of form and change the practices of design
Questions raised by digital design centre on the role of software in contemporary architectural practice, the relationship between architects and their digital tools, and above all on the way computational models act as mediums for creativity in design
Summary
Computational tools let designers build intricate digital models where geometry translates to data, and data to geometry. As our engagement with tools (tekhne) is embedded within larger organisational, social, and cultural mores (logos), plurality and variability are not accidental features of these relationships but essential They belong to the very structure of perception qua technology, which can, only proceed through enactive discovery of both tools and the worlds they give access to (see Malafouris 2011, 2014). This means that we can understand digital models as technologies of perception that are inextricably bound up with knowledge and imagination in the wider field of architecture Like any technology, these models are embedded within organisational, social, and cultural mores and lend themselves to variability and ongoing enactive discovery. This proceeds through manipulation of the models, through digital material engagement
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