DESIGN, MANUFACTURE AND EXPERIENCE

DESIGN, MANUFACTURE AND EXPERIENCE: ABOUT ARCHITECTURAL CONCEPTION
Gonçalo M Furtado C Lopes, PhD


"The interference of the digital and the appropriation of the new technologies as a mean and as a support are being felt at the level of the environment of the project (that is, at the very level of design and architectural conception), which is showing the strain of the pressure of information technology and informationalization that it has been undergoing for two decades now, to the extent that new instruments, methodologies and organizational practices are appearing in the carrying out of the design and architectural project. In this paper, based in my 2000’s “Interferências, do Digital no Campo da Arcquitectura” and subsequent books, I will review several transformations and challenges related with Design, Manufacture and Experience.
First, one points to an efficient environment of computerized machines that plan to evolve into a ‘self-generative and self-referential’ system - a new digital environment which aims is to enable design and architectural activity. In that process the development of the CAAD sector should be pinpointed, understood as an instrumental development but, most of all a methodological one, which holds the promise of na environment provided with intelligence and intervention, able to provide imaginative models, generative procedures (incorporating dynamism in the representation) and systems of thought based on casuistry.
Second, one recalls that with three-dimensional modulation supported by interfaces of instant visualization and experimentation, as well as management and manufacturing software (the ‘Parametric CAD’ and the ‘CAD CAM’), the frontiers between numeric programming and spatial experience, and between conception and production, collapse.
Finally one acknowledges that, complex theoretical approaches understand ‘modeling’ in an environment characterized by mediation (which we have been calling a digital network) as a potential construction-constitution of shared living environments, contiguous with physical constructions, which could mean the appearance of new territorial domains of architectural practice."