Meta-Parametric Design
Section snippets
Parametric modelling
Parametric modelling is now a well-established tool in the computational design community. Software applications such as Generative Components (Bentley Systems), Dynamo (Autodesk) and Grasshopper (McNeel and Associates) allow complex ideas to be quickly explored, often beyond the reach of traditional techniques such as hand sketching, physical model making and CAD.
A subset of parametric modelling based on dataflow programming associates parameters and functions to form a Directed Acyclic Graph
An implicit approach
Unlike parametric models, natural systems do not keep an explicit record of how to build an organism laid out in their genes. An organism's DNA contains rule based information that encodes an emergent process of development from a single embryo, i.e. morphogenesis. The complexity of an emergent process means that small alterations to the genotype can often lead to large changes to the phenotype, for example its size, shape and number of repeating modules in the living organism. A small change
Meta-Parametric Design
In response to both the inflexibility of explicit modelling tools and the irreducibility of an implicit approach, the possibility of automatically generating parametric models is an interesting alternative at the early design stage (Harding, Joyce, Shepherd, & Williams, 2013). Although Gero and Kumar (1993) have previously shown methods to widen the design space using re-parameterisation, this approach goes one step further in order to think topologically (DeLanda, 2002) and consider the whole
Implementation
Two real projects are shown here as examples of Embryo being used in different design contexts in practice. Firstly, to generate massing concepts for a residential development. Secondly, for a mixed-use tower project whereby parametric models are evolved to match an existing geometric concept design using shape analysis.
Conclusion
This paper began by highlighting two main approaches to form generation in computational design, explicit and implicit. The authors argued that an implicit approach, though giving the wide design exploration suitable for the concept stage, has a lack of structure that has often proven to be useful in parametric design. Such methods are therefore difficult to use in a collaborative design environment, where a common language is required for communication between humans and machines.
DAG-based
Acknowledgements
This work has been supported in part by Ramboll UK and the EPSRC funded Industrial Doctorate Centre in Systems at The University of Bath (Grant EP/G037353/1). The authors would like to thank both 3DReid and AG5 Architects, with particular mention to Charlie Whitaker & Daniel Nielsen.
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