UCLA SYMPOSIUM ON DESIGN AND COMPUTATION A WHITE PAPER 1 ______SHAPE COMPUTATION at the University of California, Los Angeles
A WHITE PAPER
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
The UCLA Symposium on Design and Computation was convened by the Vice- Chancellor for Academic Affairs with the purpose of reviewing UCLA’s achievements in this field, of examining the prospects for interdisciplinary collaborations, and of making recommendations as to how such studies might best be accommodated on campus and promoted. The Symposium Chair was Professor Lionel March. The Symposium was charged with the preparation of a WHITE PAPER on Design and Computation at UCLA.
• the Symposium reviewed UCLA’s leadership in this field over twenty-five years of research, teaching and practice, and the relationship of this work to developments in the field at other research and teaching institutions nationally and internationally;
• the Symposium delineated the field of Design and Computation and agreed on a ‘vocabulary’ to forward the discussion. Some examples were proferred. It was generally agreed that the thrust of the work was methodological and related to ‘shape computation’ as applied analytically to promote the understanding of both natural phenomena and artifacts, and synthetically in the shaping of new products in a variety of markets;
• the Symposium examined related methodologies in spatial analysis, and in configurational, or combinatorial synthesis, by way of comparison;
• the Symposium divided itself into seven expert groups: an academic overview group, two groups focussed on theoretical developments and computer implementations, and four groups concerned with past applications and future potential - archaeology, geography and urban planning, architecture and design, engineering design. Separate reports were received from these expert groups;
• the Symposium had the benefit of individual inputs from areas in the National Science Foundation related to computing and molecular biology which extended the discussion; • the Symposium discussed both research opportunities and the need for advanced pedagogical activities which would give leverage to the UCLA SYMPOSIUM ON DESIGN AND COMPUTATION A WHITE PAPER 2 ______methodology among teachers and instructors. Both Summer Institutes and a Web Site were projected for the purposes of dissemination;
• the Symposium was concerned about teaching. The pattern that was promoted was a filter-down one from post-doctoral, through a doctoral program and graduate studies, to its eventual inclusion in an undergraduate curriculum;
• the Symposium excited intellectual and scholarly enthusiasm for the enterprise and a consensus was reached concerning recommendations with the following intention: to capitalize on UCLA’s twenty-five year intellectual investment in a creative and synergistic methodology - ‘shape computation’ - of proven relevance to the design arts, of growing interest in engineering design, and of potential application in the social and natural sciences. It is to be hoped that UCLA will grasp the timely opportunity outlined in this WHITE PAPER. Members of the UCLA Symposium on Design and Computation give their enthusiastic support to the initiative. When implemented, it will revitalize a scholarly tradition which has been uniquely associated with UCLA, will encourage its development as an intellectual force across disciplines and will provide for the formation of an international center of academic excellence in ‘shape computation’.
RECOMMENDATIONS
Members of the UCLA Symposium on Design and Computation reached a broad consensus around the following points:
• UCLA’s leadership in this field over twenty-five years of research, teaching and practice is acknowledged through citations and direct influence on scholars at important research and teaching institutions nationally and internationally;
• UCLA should establish a postdoctoral and doctoral program in an appropriate scholarly context within its academic structure to reclaim the national and international high-ground in the field of ‘shape computation’;
• UCLA should move proactively to integrate interdisciplinary activities across the campus through the formation of a center of excellence in the field;
• NSF, DARPA and other funding agencies should be approached for priming such a center, especially in regard to the implementation of computer systems, and in fostering interdisciplinary work across traditional lines;
• UCLA should examine, with urgency, the need to recruit faculty, to appoint a Director and support staff, and to provide space and facilities for a center in the field. UCLA SYMPOSIUM ON DESIGN AND COMPUTATION A WHITE PAPER 3 ______COMMISSION
In a letter to Lionel March, dated March 21, 1997, Dr. Claudia Mitchell-Kernan, Vice- Chancellor for Academic Affairs, wrote:
‘I suggest a major goal for the Symposium should be to prepare a report on the status of the field which would be sent to me as anchor for future planning. I believe this is an achievable goal in the context of the interdisciplinary interactions you have proposed. I would also hope that we can begin to develop a new vocabulary which will help to illuminate the potential applications of the methodology beyond its current niche. ...
As part of your report, I also would propose that you dedicate some attention to considering an appropriate institutional environment as well as the resource requirements for your appropriately ambitious research and teaching agenda.’1
The UCLA Symposium on Design and Computation was held at the Embassy Suites Resort, Mandalay Beach, Oxnard, California, from Thursday, May 22 to Saturday, May 24, 1997.2 Some thirty participants were invited, of whom twenty-six attended, covering expertise in the following areas: anthropology, archaeology, architectural design and computation, civil and environmental engineering design, computer science, design architectonics, mathematical economics, geographical information systems, linguistics, pattern analysis, mechanical engineering design and manufacturing, physics and astrophysics, cognitive psychology, urban and regional planning, visual studies. In addition, two managers from the National Science Foundation made contributions in the areas of information, robotics and intelligent systems, and in biological infrastructure.3
This WHITE PAPER on the prospects for Design and Computation at UCLA is based on a draft report by Lionel March which was presented to participants as a framework for small working group discussions at the Symposium in the expectation that improvements would be made and new information added. That expectation was amply fulfilled. For convenience, many of the technical references were assembled in the READER especially prepared for the Symposium, although the working groups also drew attention to other materials relevant to their areas of interest. A full bibliography is appended to this WHITE PAPER.4
1 See Appendix I for the COMMISSIONING LETTER.
2 See Appendix II for the PROSPECTUS.
3 See Appendix III for the PARTICIPANTS.
4 See Appendix IV for the BIBLIOGRAPHY. UCLA SYMPOSIUM ON DESIGN AND COMPUTATION A WHITE PAPER 4 ______SHAPE COMPUTATION at the University of California, Los Angeles
A WHITE PAPER
INTRODUCTION
1 Design and Computation is quintessentially about ‘creativity’. Creativity, writes the Nobel Laureate, Herbert A. Simon (1977),
has always been surrounded by dense mists of romanticism and downright knownothingism. Even well-informed persons, who do not believe that the stork brings new babies, and who are prepared to accept an empirical account of biological creation, sometimes baulk at naturalistic explanations of the creation of ideas. It appears that the human mind is the final citadel of vitalism.
2 March (1983b), as Rector of the Royal College of Art, London, echoes this remark in his essay ‘To grasp creativity’, but he evokes the language analogy
Generative grammars provide the necessary theoretical foundation for design studies, as they do language theory. The sceptic may go far along this path but hesitate over the ‘imponderables’ of design. Granting that formal and functional aspects of design may be subject to grammatical rules, the sceptic may nevertheless wish to claim immunity for the aesthetic dimension. This is the final stand of the spontaneous heart against the scheming mind.
3 The aesthetic dimension is audaciously tackled in Algorithmic Aesthetics by Stiny and Gips (1978), the prize-winning book published following their dissertations in UCLA’s Department of System Science and Stanford’s AI Laboratory, respectively. They write
‘We believe the algorithmic approach to aesthetics taken in this study is important for two reasons. First, the postulated structure for criticism algorithms and design algorithms provides a common framework in which a number of central issues in aesthetics, which traditionally are treated separately, can be investigated uniformly and can be related. Second, just the attempt to represent aesthetic ideas or specific approaches to understanding and evaluating ... in terms of algorithms is salutary. Algorithmic representations require an explicit awareness of underlying assumptions and details that may remain hidden using less rigorous methods. Further, completed algorithmic representations of ideas provide a test of their consistency and soundness and a means of identifying their consequences: completely specified algorithms can be run on a computer.5 UCLA SYMPOSIUM ON DESIGN AND COMPUTATION A WHITE PAPER 5 ______4 Simon (1969), in The Sciences of the Artificial foresees scientists and designers finding common ground around the computer especially in the university setting. Over the years, such synergy has occurred around the Engineering Design Research Center on his own campus at Carnegie-Mellon University. Yet any explicit mechanism for generating new designs is absent in both Simon’s texts and in Myron Tribus’ (1969) Rational Descriptions, Decisions and Designs. Both Simon and Tribus follow the traditional path of engineering design, concentrating on methods of optimal search in a parametric space prescribed by a particular schema. Both admit that the generation of novel designs is the most challenging problem, but both skirt the issue and neither offers any guidance towards a constructive methodology. The paradigm of algorithmic aesthetics was reset in March and Stiny (1981) which introduces a language-using design machine. It is this language component, especially in the form of a Stiny-Gips shape grammar, which inserts what has been called ‘artificial imagination’ into the design process (Peterson, 1984).
EXAMPLES 5 Russell A. Kirsch is a pioneer of image processing, pattern recognition and chemical structure searching. His wife, Joan L. Kirsch, is an art historian. Together (Kirsch and Kirsch, 1986) they wrote a grammar to analyze some late works of the celebrated West Coast artist, Richard Diebenkorn. A corpus of paintings entitled ‘Ocean Park’ was examined and rules were defined to replicate the outlines of the original series. A blind test was then performed in which the rules were fired at random. A new outline was artificially imagined without the artist’s involvement. In a Turing-style test, Diebenkorn accepted the grammatically generated work as being in his own style, yet unlike any specific work he had until then produced (see Peterson, 1984). Some very subtle shape grammars were written by Knight (1985, 1994b) herself to describe the stylistic transformations of artists over a lifetime: one in which the rules become more complex, and one in which they are simplified.
6 Many grammars have been written in the field of architectural design. In 1986, Hanson and Radford, wrote a grammar to emulate the works of the avant-garde Australian architect, Glenn Murcutt, which the architect found ‘interesting’ in a positive sense. A more telling architectural example is the Palladian grammar of Stiny and Mitchell (1978a,b). The shape rules for this grammar were derived from a select corpus of villas to be found in Andrea Palladio’s I quattro dell’archittetura.. On showing this work to one of the world’s leading Palladian scholars, a villa design produced automatically by the grammar was criticized on cultural and behavioral grounds as not being Palladian, or of his age and times. A further search of Palladio’s complete works
5 As Knuth (1973) points out: It has often been said that a person doesn’t really understand something until he teaches it to someone else. Actually a person doesn’t really understand something until he can teach it to a computer, i.e. express it as an algorithm ... The attempt to formalize things as algorithms leads to a much deeper understanding than if we simply try to understand in the traditional way. UCLA SYMPOSIUM ON DESIGN AND COMPUTATION A WHITE PAPER 6 ______uncovered a villa with an identical plan which had not been in the original corpus used to generate the shape grammar. The scholar was silenced, or at least he did not respond to this new vindicating evidence. Flemming (1987) examines the complexities of the Queen Anne house style with its multiple roof forms and discovers that just three rules are sufficient to generate the seemingly limitless variety. Buelinckx (1993a) shows that the City churches of Sir Christopher Wren can be classified using three sets of shape rules, and that Wren uses a composite of all three sets in St. Paul’s Cathedral which was under construction during the building of the churches. Knight (1985, 1994) gives an example of the stylistic shift in Frank Lloyd Wright’s work from the early Prairie houses to the later Usonian homes. Small changes in one grammar account for dramatic changes in the transformation of style. The most convenient source of examples in art, decorative design and architecture of the grammatical approach is to be found in Knight’s Transformations in Design: a Formal Approach to Stylistic Change and Innovation in the Visual Arts.
7 The grammatical approach has been applied in areas as diverse as archaeology and engineering. Both fields are interested in artifacts: the former in interpreting found objects; the latter in creating new designs, or improving on existing designs. In engineering there have been grammatical applications in aeronautic design (both in industry and university), structural design, mechanical design, robotics. Knight (1985, 1994b) gives the most complete application of the grammatical approach to archaeological evidence in her meticulous study of Greek geometric pottery.
8 An area such as human geography, having interests in spatial information systems, seems ripe for shape grammatical study. While macromolecular studies have concentrated on unraveling the sequences, only now is there a growing concern for the ‘folding’ characteristics of macromolecules in space, the shape of enzymes and proteins.
INTENTION
9 The WHITE PAPER is presented in anticipation that UCLA will grasp this timely opportunity - to capitalize on its twenty-five year investment in a creative and synergistic field of proven relevance to the design arts, of growing interest in engineering design, and of potential application in the social and natural sciences. Members of the UCLA Symposium on Design and Computation give their enthusiastic support to the initiative. It will revitalize a scholarly tradition which has been uniquely associated with UCLA, encourage its development as an intellectual force across disciplines, and initiate the formation of an international center of academic excellence in ‘shape computation’. UCLA SYMPOSIUM ON DESIGN AND COMPUTATION A WHITE PAPER 7 ______BACKGROUND
10 Over a decade, Design and Computation has been an area of concentration in the graduate and doctoral programs in Architecture and Urban Design at UCLA.6 At UCLA the subject has been honed around theoretical and applied work in architecture. Meanwhile, researchers in archaeology and various engineering fields have followed UCLA’s leadership, most notably in the University of Cambridge and at California Institute of Technology. MIT have clearly indicated their interest in this development in recent faculty appointments. This new initiative is designed to establish a world-class program concentrating on interdepartmental research at the postdoctoral and doctoral levels at UCLA. Its purpose is to promote and disseminate an innovative methodology with potential applications to those disciplines in which shape and ‘shape computation’ are important concerns.
11 The questions to be answered include: what are the distinctive features of this methodology (what is its ‘vocabulary’); what has been achieved so far; how to broaden the methodology beyond the early application areas; how to engage with new applications. There other issues which relate directly to internal, institutional matters. Some observations by Lionel March and George Stiny on these matters is reserved for further discussion among interested parties on campus.
SHAPE 12 The primary area of interest in Design and Computation has been the representation and computation of shape. The question has been asked: what would arithmetic have been like if shape, not number, had been of greatest interest to us?7 At first glance, it might seem that number gives rise to arithmetic, and shape to geometry. But traditional geometry has, almost from the beginning, been interested in measuring shape, comparing lengths and angles, rather than in the percept of shape itself. Euclid concludes his thirteen books with a comparison of side lengths among the five Platonic solids inscribed in a unit sphere. He makes no study of the symmetry of these solids, and such a qualitative study is left to investigators in the nineteenth century. Descartes’ analytical geometry succeeds in reducing shape to algebraic forms in which the notions of point, line, plane are solutions to simultaneous equations; and almost all geometry since has been the study of algebraic forms under particular constraints which
6 With the dissolution of the Graduate School of Architecture and Urban Planning in 1995, the Desaign and Computation program was transferred to the Department of Design in the new School of the Arts and Architecture. Two new degrees were approved by the Graduate Council: an MA and a PhD in Design and Computation. Three of the four faculty that transferred with the program were subsequently recruited by MIT and GATech. The program was temporarily suspended in 1996.
7 Wittgenstein, L (1991) VII-61. UCLA SYMPOSIUM ON DESIGN AND COMPUTATION A WHITE PAPER 8 ______incidentally permit a pictorial interpretation.8 Putting two shapes together to produce a new shape is not that important to geometers.9 It is, however, important to designers and those who study designs; and appears to be of growing importance to scientists in the analysis of macromolecular structures and the synthesis of new materials particularly at the supermolecular and cellular levels.
‘A NEW VOCABULARY’ OF DISCOURSE9 13 In this context: a shape is any finite arrangement of points, line segments, or bounded surfaces and solids.10 This is a shape, as defined here, in three dimensions
.
Line segments are bounded by points, surfaces by lines, and solids by surfaces. The relation between two shapes in a given dimension is said to be a spatial relation in that dimension. For example, two such relations between a line and a surface in three dimensions are shown below
.
8 Grünbaum B, Shephard G C (1987). In their forward these distinguished geometers write: ‘At high-school level it has long been the tradition to use geometry as a vehicle for teaching logical reasoning and the deductive method, without much regard for the geometric content. At the research level geometry has become no more than a specialized branch of algebra or analysis. In each case the essence of the subject - its visual appeal - has been completely submerged in technicalities and abstractions. ... To consider geometry without drawings as a worthy goal seems to us as silly as to extol the virtues of soundless music ...’
9 The cursory description of shape grammars given here is given an extended introductory treatment in Knight (1994b) pp43-107. UCLA SYMPOSIUM ON DESIGN AND COMPUTATION A WHITE PAPER 9 ______A shape rule recognizes a shape on the left hand side (the point indicates an origin) and replaces it with a new shape on the right hand side
.
Most often a shape rule applies to part of a given shape: such a part is a subshape. An application of the shape rule above to a shape on the left gives a new derivation on the right
c
.
Parametric shape grammars use shape schemata whose geometries vary according to values attributed by the parameters. A typical parametric transformation might be
c
.
14 A shape rule operates under specified spatial transformations such as reflection, rotation, translation, scale. Algebraically, a shape rule operates under a group; most frequently in current work, the Euclidean group. UCLA SYMPOSIUM ON DESIGN AND COMPUTATION A WHITE PAPER 10 ______
Below is shown a shape rule application under translation. Note the shift from the origin shown in the shape rule above
.
And here is a shape rule application under rotation
, a shape rule application under reflection
, and a shape rule application under scaling (dilation)
.
Shape rules may be additive (drawing), UCLA SYMPOSIUM ON DESIGN AND COMPUTATION A WHITE PAPER 11 ______or subtractive (erasing)
.
15 Shape rules are applied recursively in a shape grammar, and Stiny (1975) demonstrates that such a recursive system is computationally equivalent to a Turing machine. Stiny and Gips (1980) compare shape grammars with symbolic production systems, and Stiny (1982b) contrasts a shape grammar to a set grammar. Whereas a set grammar, like standard production systems, is discrete and atomic; a shape grammar is essentially continuous and nonatomic. Set grammars are closely allied to array grammars, tree grammars and graph grammars often used in pattern recognition and scientific applications. March and Earl (1977) use what is effectively a graph grammar in determining the topologically equivalent architectural plans with n-rooms. Stiny (1982b) defines the difference succinctly:
... designs in languages defined by a set grammar are made up of shapes in S [the set of shapes in the language], where designs in languages defined by shape grammars are made up of shapes and subshapes in S. Set grammars treat designs as symbolic objects, they require that designs always be parsed into the elements of the sets from which they are formed. The integrity of the compositional units in designs is thus preserved, as these parts cannot be recombined and decomposed in different ways. In contrast, shape grammars treat designs as spatial objects: they require no special parsing of designs into fixed subshapes. Spatial ambiguities are thus allowed, as given compositional units in design can be recombined and decomposed in different ways.
This difference is keen and delivers that special power to the shape grammar formalism for dealing with emergence, the unique quality of recognizing shapes which may be formed from combining parts (subshapes) of other shapes into new, and unexpected, wholes (Stiny, 1994).
16 Objects in a shape grammar undergo spatial transformation. The matching relation is on subshapes embedded in the shape of interest. Of special note is the concept of maximal shape in which several, appropriately configured lines, surfaces, or solids are amalgamated into a single maximal line, maximal surface, or maximal solid. The original parts are thus fused into a new whole, and these particular parts cease to have any special status. All parsings, all partitions are then as good as any other. It is from this unique property that, in a shape grammatical calculation, emergence is possible without a break in computational continuity (Stiny, 1994). Unlike atomistic systems where apparent novelty arises from a reconfiguring of predetermined vocabulary UCLA SYMPOSIUM ON DESIGN AND COMPUTATION A WHITE PAPER 12 ______elements, entirely original shapes may be generated in a shape grammar from an infinitude of subshapes embedded in the continua of spatial elements. Yet another unique feature of shape grammars is that there is no formal vocabulary of which to speak. Shape algebras are Boolean rings without a unit, and consequently all possible finite shapes are included (Stiny, 1992). In theory, there is no priority given to select shapes, except perhaps as a matter of practical, or didactic, convenience. In this, shape grammars may be distinguished from computer-aided design and solid modeling systems with declared ‘primitives’.
SHAPE COMPUTATION 17 Fractal geometries have played a significant part in recent scientific studies. Essentially shape grammars are a generalization of these geometries (Stiny, 1977). Fractals, like many pattern recognition, cellular automata and geographical systems, are punctual, that is to say, at root they operate as algebras on sets of points, usually in two-dimensions. Stiny (1992) gives a table of algebras, Uij (18 )
These algebras, to quote Stiny:
... provide the main objects and devices used in shape grammars. An algebra Uij contains shapes. Every shape is a finite but possibly empty set of basic elements that are maximal with respect to one another. Basic elements are points, lines, planes, or solids that are defined in dimension i = 0, 1, 2, or 3, and combined in dimension j i. For i > 0, they have finite, nonzero content - either length, area, or volume - and boundaries that are shapes in the algebra Ui - 1, i. Basic elements are connected: ones of dimension i > 0 cannot be divided by others of less than i - 1. Points divide lines, lines divide planes, and planes divide solids.
19 Current computer applications mostly operate with the algebras in the top row of Stiny’s table, although they may appear to simulate higher dimensional elements. Curiously, there does not seem to have been much work done on boundaries in this context (Earl, 1997), despite their central importance. It was Socrates who defined shape as ‘the limit of the solid’, that is, in terms of boundaries.10 He had first teased Meno with the definition that shape always follows color, and this is the position that Knight (1989) assumes in developing color grammars. The boundary of shape and the content, or coboundary, of shape are of significant importance and both Earl and Knight have made key contributions in their papers. In ‘Weights’, Stiny (1992) generalizes these matters and effectively shows how to set up parallel rule systems in algebras, Wij, which compute nonspatial, functional information related to shape. It is here that descriptions employing simplicial complexes and graded patterns may have a promising future (see Earl and Johnson, 1981; Stiny, 1981; March, 1996). Elsewhere, Krishnamurti and Earl (1992) have tackled the computational problem of shape recognition in three dimensions, in which they ask under which spatial transformations is one shape a
10 Plato Meno 75, 76. UCLA SYMPOSIUM ON DESIGN AND COMPUTATION A WHITE PAPER 13 ______subshape of another?
20 While the theory of shape grammars indicates that direct ‘shape computation’ is theoretically possible, the most practical approach available today requires a translation into digital computation: from shape, then to numerical representation and transformation, and back again to shape. Krishnamurti and Earl (1992) also
U00 U01 U02 U03
U11 U12 U13
U22 U23
U33 UCLA SYMPOSIUM ON DESIGN AND COMPUTATION A WHITE PAPER 14 ______
Figure 1. Tableau of shape algebras. cope with the digital requirement of recognizing shapes in rational space.11 As for computing itself, Tapia (1995, 1997) makes a start on the presentation of shape
11 It is not generally appreciated that shapes as simple as an equilateral triangle cannot be precisely represented on a digital computer. Indeed, it is a mathematical fact (Erdös, Gruber and Hammer,1989, p12) that of all regular polygons, only the square may be embedded in a lattice of integer points, that is, may be exactly depicted on a digital computer. UCLA SYMPOSIUM ON DESIGN AND COMPUTATION A WHITE PAPER 15 ______grammatical computation in terms of the human interface, and Chase (1996, 1997) has investigated the use of logical operators to represent spatial relations in ‘shape computation’.
SOME RELATED METHODOLOGIES 21 The group of colleagues who share a common background in the development of shape grammars, have not always trodden the same path. It is possible to discern two distinct methodological developments.
22 The first arose at the University of Cambridge out of a concern to investigate questions related to urban design: questions of land use and built form. This work involved the representation of simple geometrical forms which allowed for certain factors to be mathematically modeled and computed. Effectively, the work ignored shape for the convenience of number. In as much as shape was addressed, it was done so using atomic units such as quadrates and cuboids under Boolean composition (March and Steadman, 1971; Martin and March, 1972, March, 1975). The work at the urban scale involved statistical modeling of spatial distributions over discrete networks using entropy-maximizing, or information-minimizing, techniques under multiple constraints. Although the pictorial output of such models took up the shape of the urban areas they modeled, the network was computationally no more than a topology which could be screwed up into a tangled ball. The model would still work. Shape was not integral to the model (Crowther and Echenique, 1972; see also Batty 1976; and DE LA Barra, 1989). The mathematical models of physicists, biologists and ecologists guided much of this work. At Cambridge, parallel investigations were being undertaken in geography (Haggett and Chorley, 1967), economics (Stone, 1966) and archaeology (Leach, 1962; Clarke, 1968), see March (1975) for further details of these interdisciplinary connections.12
23 At the University of Waterloo in engineering, and later at the Open University in technology, a second interest developed in configurations and combinatorics. The development was a natural one given that the spatial systems of interest were topologically constrained. The lessons of chemists moving from the statistical mechanics of ideal gases to that of long-chain molecules served as an example, as did certain microgeometric studies, for example, of surfaces in metallurgy. Again, shape was largely treated in terms of discrete atomic pieces. This was ‘kit-of-parts’ designing. It was possible to show that many different shapes might share the same topology under graph-theoretic equivalence, a point which reinforced the criticism of the ‘shapeless’ Cambridge models. A configurational approach could enumerate and
12 The Centre for Land Use and Built Form Studies was established by Sir Leslie Martin in 1969. The first Director was Lionel March. Now, as the Martin Centre for Architectural and Urban Studies it stands in the highest ranks (5 on a scale 1-5) in the National Research Assessment UCLA SYMPOSIUM ON DESIGN AND COMPUTATION A WHITE PAPER 16 ______classify all possible designs of a certain kind, thus characterizing parametric schemata among, say, architectural plans, or kinematic chains (Earl and March, 1979; Earl, 1979). Typical work included rectangular dissection in 2- and 3-space (Steadman, 1983, Krishnamurti, 1979; Earl, 1977, 1978; Krishnamurti and Earl, 1997). Equivalence under symmetry is important in such enumerations. Whereas theoretical crystallography tends to consider infinite ‘tilings’ of space, periodic and non-periodic, several configurational studies examine finite subsets called ‘animals’ made up of contiguous cells (for example, Matela and O’Hare, 1976; Krishnamurti and Roe, 1978, 1979; Earl, 1980, ). This configurational work in design also contributed to some early investigations in the Macromolecular Structures Group at the University of California, San Francisco (Fletterick, Schroer, Matela, 1985).13
24 On a spectrum: at one end, the early Cambridge work tends to be aggregate and statistical, assuming that large ensembles and infinite arrays under generalized constraints will inform us of the most probable outcomes, or of general lawfulness; while the Waterloo and Open University configurationalists stand in the middle examining countable populations of lawfully constrained classes of designs; and, at the other end, the Los Angeles shape grammarians produce shape languages, often small and finite, of very specific rule-determined designs. Each method collects objects together in a class: the ensemble, a population, a language. Under either equivalence, or tolerance, the objects may be further ordered according to aspects of interest. The emphasis in the ensemble tends to be on parametric values of state variables: in a configurational population, on the incidence and symmetry of elements satisfying necessary physical conditions; and in a shape language, on the free mustering of production rules and their recursive application in a derivation. The search for a specific design also differs. In an ensemble there is just one most probable case given maximum likelihood; in a well tailored shape language all designs fit, and choice is as likely to be a matter of contingent selection as it is to be one of utility (March and Stiny, 1981).
25 The methodologies of statistical mechanics and of combinatorial configurations are established now in many fields. Shape grammars are the new boys on the block, answering to the needs of those who have specific and computational interests in bounded shape and associated characteristics, and who seek precise, yet licentious, command over the methodology. Almost all prior methodologies work in U0j algebras, especially in 2- and 3-dimensions. Shape grammars offer the opportunity to work with lines, surfaces and volumes (not conceived as sets of points) in algebras Uij for values of i > 0. Many symmetrical patterns and most fractals assume infinite recursion of a small set of rules or generators applied in parallel for their mathematically interesting results;
13 Established by Lionel March as Head of the Design Discipline in 1976, the Centre for Configurational Studies, is now recognized as a ‘number one’ research unit of The Open University. The Department of Design and Innovation stands alone at the highest rank in the National Research Assessment among Design units in the United Kingdom (5 on a scale 1-5). UCLA SYMPOSIUM ON DESIGN AND COMPUTATION A WHITE PAPER 17 ______shape grammars are often concerned with limited recursion over somewhat larger sets of rules applied sequentially.
APPLICATION AND INFLUENCE 26 There are many examples of stylistic analysis in architecture, the decorative arts, and fine arts using shape grammars. There have been some applications in archaeology. Shape grammars have been cited in engineering applications and architectural practice. While grammatical systems have been employed in developmental biology and cellular interactions (Gips and Stiny, 1980), the applications are hampered by their symbolic nature so that the vitalistic quality of emergence, unique to shape grammars, is inexorably frustrated. Perhaps, the closest encounter of a scholarly kind between shape grammarians and a physical scientist took place when March presented a plenary address, following one by Ilya Prigogine (1985), at the 1982 Seventh International Conference on Systems Science in Brussels (March and Stiny, 1985).
27 That fractals have impacted certain scientific areas suggests that there could be a significant future for their generalization - as shape grammars - wherever shape is an important ingredient of study. It cannot be stressed enough that shape grammars (Stiny, 1975) include fractals (see Stiny, 1977b) and symmetry patterns (Grünbaum and Shephard, 1986; Shubnikov and Koptsik, 1974) as special cases (see, for example, Knight, 1995, 1997a). As Stiny (1991 pp174-175) remarks: ‘... there is a lot more to shape grammars than fractals and symmetrical patterns, and all of it is of greater interest and use’ . Shape grammars provide graphic exemplars of systems operating through local rules under local symmetry to produce global effects: a theoretical approach frequently seen in scientific studies today. If contemporary studies of complexity, order and chaos, have been advanced by considerations of fractal geometry, symmetry patterns, and cellular automata then where will such studies go once the full impact of the shape grammar generalization becomes fully understood and appreciated? Further, a shape grammar is not another mathematical model to be computed, it is in and of itself a computational device, a Turing Machine. This is its ultimate power. While it is not uncommon for theory to follow practice, in this case the theory is well honed, its revision and restatement imminent (Stiny, 1998). The methodology rests on solid theoretical foundations. Once adequate practical foundations are laid, the edifice of applications may rise.
RESEARCH PROGRAMS AND PEDAGOGY
28 There are three levels of research discernible here: theoretical refinement, technical implementation, and applications in specific fields. The first requires mathematical development; the second, computer science resources; the third, active collaboration with application areas. These levels define a timeline for the research programs. Before the ‘shape computation’ methodology can be usefully applied in other disciplines, it UCLA SYMPOSIUM ON DESIGN AND COMPUTATION A WHITE PAPER 18 ______will be necessary to implement, using existing computer technologies, a shape grammar interpreter which is user-friendly; concurrently, the mathematical systems upon which the algorithms are based will need further refinement. Below, are sketched out some research topics under three headings.
THEORETICAL REFINEMENTS14 29 Underlying the approach to Design and Computation are the ideas of shape description and ‘shape computation’. This theory is well established in several of its elements, especially the algebraic framework in which the objects and operations of a ‘shape computation’ is embedded. However, those algebras which associate physical and functional properties with shape require further development. The combinations through sums and products provide complex, multiple view design descriptions which require investigation. The connection of theory and practice is important so that implementation and application informs theory and conversely. The requirement for research to cover the spectrum of activities is considered vital for the development of a theory which emphasizes the perceptual objects of design; a theme of many discussions at the Symposium. In particular, the role of experimentation through implementations of perceptual objects will provide context and motivation for theory.
30 Outside the algebraic framework there are a number of theoretical issues open for examination. The transformations of shapes are central to how shape rules are applied in a shape grammar and more generally to the definitions of equivalence of shapes and descriptions. The full range of transformations from the geometric Euclidean transformations currently employed to the combinatorial and topological should be investigated. Further, the development of intrinsic geometry for shapes will augment coordinate frame views. Through general transformations and intrinsic geometry more general geometric elements namely; curves, surfaces and higher dimensional elements (which may be appropriate for handling the configuration spaces of moving shapes) can be incorporated into shape grammars. These developments should facilitate connection to the areas of shape computing, geometric modeling and their applications in computer aided design (CAD). Closely related to the theme of transformation is parametric shape grammars; a topic of widespread importance in applications. Finally, transformations are intimately connected to the description of motion within the shape grammar framework. Theoretical developments in shape motion will have applications in diverse areas from macromolecular to mechanical design.
31 The structure of designs and shape descriptions within a formal algebraic framework allows generalization of the specifically shape view initially motivating this enquiry. These concerns have been investigated only recently by consideration of parts of shapes, closure operators and topologies. A distinctive feature is the ability to define continuity of generation, interpretation and description within the algebras. The coherence of descriptions provided by continuity and related conditions in a grammar
14 Based on a draft prepared at the Symposium by Christopher Earl and George Stiny UCLA SYMPOSIUM ON DESIGN AND COMPUTATION A WHITE PAPER 19 ______generation needs to be investigated. Particular attention should be given be continuous and related types of development in the processes of constructing classes of possible designs.
32 Further areas of theoretical development were brought to the fore in discussions at the Symposium. These include: the formal representation of shape algebras and grammars for computation; the descriptions of function, the combination and emergence of functions in a ‘shape computation’; and the distinction between the conceptual and the perceptual. This last may be a peripheral issue but the connection to current philosophical concerns in parts, wholes, compounds and aggregates should be embraced in any theoretical study.
33 To summarise, considerable theoretical developments are already in place, providing a sound foundation for implementation and application. Further research on the themes outlined above will seek direction and augmentation from experimentation and application.
COMPUTER IMPLEMENTATION15
34 The success of shape grammars in design applications is highly dependent on the availability of effective shape grammar interpreters. Such interpreters must include a good graphical (visual) interface -- one that allows for the interactive, nonsymbolic specification of rules, for good control of rule applications, and for intelligent support for design exploration; and links to tutorials for naive users.
35 Any new shape grammar interpreter will follow on the series of increasingly sophisticated demonstration computer programs that have been developed to tackle specific aspects of the problem (Gips, 1975; Krishnamurti, 1982; Krishnamurti and Giraud, 1986; Stouffs, 1996, Chase, 1996, Tapia, 1996). The interpreter will be used by instructors and students in courses about shape grammars and by people who would like to use shape grammars in their research. The interpreter should be easy to use for the creation and execution of shape grammars; it should be visual and intuitive, reflecting the innate character of shape grammars; it should be sufficiently powerful to support interesting applications, but the emphasis should be on ease of use, elegance of design, robustness, and openness to improvements. Programs should be implemented in a language that allows them to be used on all common platforms.
36 While it is tempting to try and implement all the theoretical developments in a new shape grammar interpreter it makes sense to take the design of such an interpreter step by step. A possible ordering of increasing complexity on grammatical systems suggests such a line of development: non-parametric set grammars then parametric set grammars, both offering foregone decompositions and thereby excluding the potency of
15 Based on a draft prepared at the Symposium by Ramesh Krishnamurti, James Gips, Mark Tapia UCLA SYMPOSIUM ON DESIGN AND COMPUTATION A WHITE PAPER 20 ______emergence; next non-parametric shape grammars then parametric shape grammars, both offering unlimited decompositions with prospects of emergence; to be followed by attribute grammars with weights and colors, and those with general spatio-temporal transformations.
Pedagogical Issues 37 It is important to identify types of shape grammars that are appropriate and effective for teaching, and for different design applications. Specific, existing grammars proven effective in education should be accessible on the web and shared among educators in the field. A web site would provide introductory and advanced information about shape grammars, as well as links to researchers in the field. The site would be the principal distribution mechanism for computer programs associated with the shape grammar interpreter and for accompanying instructional material. The web site would provide for the storage and exchange of shape grammars that run on the program and for continuing discussions and conversations among interested parties. Traditional issues in different application areas can then be reframed and enriched in terms of novel shape grammar methodologies and supporting computer technology. Indeed, the relationship between well established grammatical systems, such as graph grammars, and shape grammars could be fruitfully explored. While comparative evaluations of current computational geometry applications with the newer shape grammar paradigm might usefully be made where these intersect.
Research Agenda 38 There are a number of important research issues that bear directly on the future use and elaboration of the shape grammar methodology in design education and practice. Most have implications for computer implications and again extend the current state of CAD practice. First, it is crucial to develop a theoretical basis for parametric shape grammars that can lead to an efficient interpreter with an effective user interface. This holds the promise of making shape grammars more and more able to do what traditional designers do so well with hand and eye and pencil and paper. Second, it is necessary to develop new applications with weights and other descriptions encoding, for example, aspects of structure, function, use, and material. Once again, this is expected to bring shape grammars and current design practice closer and closer together. And finally, it is important to connect shape grammars to rapid prototyping technologies, so that designs generated by grammars -- often complex ones that are difficult to produce by hand or difficult to understand in two dimensional representations -- can be investigated by means of physical models. This is no small agenda, as the underlying problems are difficult and sometimes deep. But the potential for education and practice is immense. Shape grammars in this augmented environment promise to make computation a truly creative partner in all aspects of the best design practice. UCLA SYMPOSIUM ON DESIGN AND COMPUTATION A WHITE PAPER 21 ______SOME CURRENT APPLICATIONS OF SHAPE COMPUTATION
16 ARCHAEOLOGY 39 Archaeologists deal with artifacts and their shapes, but they do little theorizing about shapes. This lack of theory about artifacts matches how little theory there is about material culture in anthropology -- and even material objects in contemporary western society with its unprecedented abundance of physical things. Most of the treatment of shapes in archaeology is by some kind of classification, but with no clear articulation as to what the entities so classified represent. Conversely, there is no theory of classification that would serve to inform how shapes should be considered.
40 This demonstrates a broad need for a general theory of transformations: one that links the conceptual domain of the artisan (the design), to the material form that is produced (the artifact), to the transformation of that material object through use and post-discard processes, to archaeological recovery, and then to reconception by the archaeologist of knowledge of the past (Chippindale, 1986; 1992). Those transformations start with human knowledge, then take material form, and return to human knowledge through the theories brought to bear on the material forms by the archaeologist. The common framework for historical studies of design explores intent in relation to how that intent is expressed: this cannot work in archaeology because we only have evidence of intent as it is made physical in the artifact, and thereby made available for observation. For the archaeologist, intent must be inductive with few means of validation. We need appropriate computational devices that can deal with intent and the material object without presuming that one can be simply expressed in the other. The shape grammar formalism with its underlying repertoire of algebras appears to provide the necessary computational media, and has already enjoyed some success in this area.
41 But often, our grasp of the variety of shapes is not so strong that one can specify the set of shapes sufficiently well productively to use a shape grammar. Current methodologies focus on measurement and statistical analysis of variables selected without an adequate theory of the relationship between design and its material implementation as form. These conventional approaches are demonstrably wrong from a theoretical perspective and have limited success in practice (Read ref.) Once again, there is ample reason to explore alternative strategies suggested by shape grammars and related computational approaches.
42 Archaeological theory needs formal methods to describe how artifacts are generated which are grounded in the material evidence rather than in suppositions about the human actors. Formalist habits of enumerating designs and the range of possible shapes which might exist are a good starting point for understanding the universe within which artifacts can be constructed. In this, the particular materials and technologies of
16 Based on a draft prepared at the Symposium by Dwight Read and Christopher Chippendale UCLA SYMPOSIUM ON DESIGN AND COMPUTATION A WHITE PAPER 22 ______production -- e.g. flint and flint-knapping, clay and pottery-making, metal and metal- working -- are key to how the vocabulary of shapes is expressed.
43 The critical value of shape grammar work to archeology at present is then not so much through shape grammars per se, as through the attitudes towards designed objects and underlying conceptualization of the shape grammar approach. Effective work in archaeology so far has dealt with: motifs on painted pottery , prehistoric burial mounds, lithic reduction, rock-art, pottery production sequences, lithic production sequences, classification based on shape properties, and artifact outline considered as a grammar (for examples, see papers by Boast, 1987; Chippindale, 1986, 1992; Hassan and Perles, 1992; Knight, 1986; Read, 1982, 1987). The common theme of these studies is a concern with shape, with formal methods, and with rules of transformation. Artifacts are not viewed in isolation but related to the complex interplay between design, object and symbolic meaning systems. Archaeological materials are so varied and capricious that it requires an eclectic approach. For any given body of ancient material -- generally a fragmentary sample of an ill-understood universe of forms -- this may lead to a formal grammar, to an algebra, to formal analyses of other kinds, or simply to a formalist preconception of the right starting point for a non-mathematical treatment. In all of these respects, shape grammars and their algebras provide a center for future exploration and study.
44 There is a natural intersection between archaeology and a proposed center for ‘shape computation’ through a concern with the interplay between design and shape, and how these are worked in material culture. Where design starts with a desired form and leads to its material expression in the made artifact, archaeology starts with the found artifact as material expression and from that recovers the intended design. Both studies work with generative synthesis and with analytical reduction along the same axis; which is why they have strong potential to work together creatively. 45 A first subject to which to apply a fully formal approach could be the systematics of flaked stone tools. There is a central body of archaeological material, exceptionally well suited to formalist methods, for which there is already a good body of formal and informal studies, and a respect in the research community for a mathematical approach. We consider a brief and intense collaborative program, which brought together a group of perhaps 6-8 established researchers to work together for a period of perhaps 6-8 weeks, would be able to make the decisive breakthrough in producing a formal synthesis in book form. This would be an admirable way to inaugurate a productive relationship between archeology on the one hand and a center devoted to the study of ‘shape computation’ on the other.
GEOGRAPHY AND PLANNING 17 46 Shape grammars have potential applicability in many areas of geography, dealing with the representation and analysis of spatial objects and configuration, namely spatial
17 Based on a draft prepared at the Symposium by Michael Batty and Helen Couclelis UCLA SYMPOSIUM ON DESIGN AND COMPUTATION A WHITE PAPER 23 ______analysis, geographic information theory, spatial database design, and the modeling of spatial processes. There are interesting geographical problems corresponding to most of the areas indicated by the matrix of algebras Uij referred to elsewhere in the report, but there has been little concern with shape in geography to date. Geographers have been concerned with the emergence of pattern at the superordinate level but have seldom examined the emergence of patterns at the subordinate level of the basic units of study. For example, fractal and cellular automata models of spatial processes have been concerned with the emergence of global properties of geographical systems defined from elementary units composed of point patterns.
47 Geographers are concerned with problems of aggregating spatial distributions where the focus has been upon the numbers of units or zones rather than their shape, with problems of point patterns and their spatial influence, and ways of representing points and vectors across different scales as in spatial data base design. There is however a class of problems where shape is clearly relevant. For example, problems of organizing spatial units to meet some criterion as in political redistricting, and the definition of service areas based on school, hospital, and other emergency services, involve shape which is clearly part of their solution. There is another class of problems involving the representation of statistical distributions usually based on points which can be transformed into spatial equivalents, such as those for which Voronoi polygons can be defined, were shape is important. Network analysis is well developed in geography, for example with respect to transportation networks where geometry as well as topology is important, and it would appear that shape grammars might be relevant to generating new insights into problems of movement and accessibility.
48 We consider that shape grammars are relevant to different types of spatial processes and their dynamics and that there are important issues in mapping the generative aspects of grammars onto these. In short, there are many examples of geographical modeling and simulations which potentially might emphasize shape but do not do so explicitly at present. The generative basis of shape grammars might be mapped onto such structures by adapting the dynamics of how the problem is simulated and/or optimized to the ways grammars are evolved.
The Longer Term Research Program 49 Geographers do not generally use the term ‘design’ in that most geographical modeling and computation emphasize how systems and their components ‘are’ or ‘behave’. The difference between positive and normative is strong, although there are a small but growing set of examples such as political redistricting referred to above which are design-based in the sense in which ‘shape computation’ has been developed. However, there is an enormous potential area of ‘shape computation’ which pertains to how systems, not just geographical systems but any systems, develop in space and time. In short ‘shape computation’ might be adapted to all kinds of dynamical systems theory where objective functions and constraints are not necessarily explicit. In one sense, early UCLA SYMPOSIUM ON DESIGN AND COMPUTATION A WHITE PAPER 24 ______developments in cellular automata theory applied to geographical problems such as those by Tobler (1979) explored such possibilities but there is a much wider program of research which might be spurred by the adaptation of the philosophy and methodology of shape grammars to geographical modeling.
50 There are however more obvious areas where ‘shape computation’ is relevant in its design context, and these are to city and regional planning, to urban design, and to urban policy analysis where shape and location are important. In the last twenty years, location and space has become less significant in these areas as other attributes of the social systems to which such planning and design refers have come to the fore. In fact, space and location is returning to the agenda and there exist many opportunities now to develop new research directions in urban design and planning which emphasize how shape interacts with space and location to achieve better quality of life in cities through the physical manipulations of land uses, buildings and transportation systems.
A Research Agenda 51 What is required is an explicit research agenda identifying specific topics in geography and planning where the theory of shape grammars appears promising. The effort to date has been mostly in architecture as an exemplar field for applications. We consider that an NSF initiative identifying potential application areas is required. In this context of planning and design, there needs to be a number of key targeted problems; for example applications of shape grammars to: political redistricting and related location-allocation problems such as school, hospital and emergency service area definition; the shape of geographical zones in spatial distributions involving aggregation problems such as the modifiable areal unit problem; the development of shape grammars for settlement growth simulation and optimization; a thorough examination of shape in the context of scale, location, geometry and topology in theoretical geography.
ARCHITECTURAL DESIGN , EDUCATION , AND PRACTICE 18 52 The use of shape grammars encourages experimentation and innovation in the conceptual stages of design. The rules used in grammars provide a focus for experimentation that allows for the creative exploration of realistic design possibilities expressed in drawings and models that far exceeds the expectations of traditional practice. In fact, experience with shape grammars over the past decade in architecture suggests that they allow for the generation of a variety of complex designs that are difficult, tedious, or impossible to produce by traditional means. This enables computers to take an active part in the generation of serious design possibilities for the first time, moving standard computer aided design (CAD) practice and methodology beyond their strictly analytic and presentational concerns. Successful CAD technologies in most areas -- for example, visualization, animation, comprehensive analysis and simulation -- need a computable model with a high level of detail on which to act. This
18 Based on a draft prepared by Robin Liggett, Terry Knight and Ulrich Flemming UCLA SYMPOSIUM ON DESIGN AND COMPUTATION A WHITE PAPER 25 ______can be supplied by shape grammars in new and exciting ways that extend the limited power of current modeling tools.
53 The many overlapping issues confronting architectural education and practice, and CAD development are merely one indication the interdisciplinary nature of the shape grammar methodology. The future development of the area, and its integration into education and practice require a coordinated group of researchers and teachers. This seems best approached via a center, so as not to dissipate or duplicate efforts in separate departments.
ENGINEERING 19 54 Engineering involves the analysis and synthesis (design) of artifacts and systems. Artifacts have shape, and thus representational formalisms for shape are important. Additionally, shape and function are interrelated in complex and important ways. Formal representation of function and its relationship to shape is fundamental to future advances in engineering design methodology. Functions interact in surprising and unexpected ways, and thus exhibit emergent (synergistic) properties analogous to emergent shapes. Therefore , a significant opportunity for shape grammars is to enable this extension to engineering function.
55 Historically synthesis has been viewed as an informal (artistic) activity, in engineering and architecture, and other fields. Recent theoretical advances, including shape grammars, have provided structure for formalizing portions of engineering design processes. Is representation and computation of shape the primary area of interest to this nascent activity, or is shape one of the early application areas where algebras can be used to formalize design? Answering this question is not necessary at this time, but the answer will play a crucial role in determining the future course of this effort. Synthesis (design) is one of the most intellectually challenging research areas, and one that has not received a significant level of attention in the United States. A strong research activity organized now can establish leadership in this academically and industrially important area.
56 A formalism, such as a grammar, can: generate many results, often among them results that are surprising and would not have been generated by people; can generate valid designs; and can automate portions of the design procedure.
57 Examples of published work demonstrating applications of grammars to engineering include: graph grammars - truss design (Spillers, 1972), gear trains (Finger, Rinderle, 1989, 1990), feature recognition (Finger, Safier, 1990); set-type grammars - dome design (Shea, Cagan, 1996); reconfigurable robots (Wells, 1994); shape grammars - bearing configurations (Earl, 1979); bracing rectangular frames (Buelinckx, 1994). Brown
19 Based on a draft prepared at the Symposium by Susan Finger, Alan de Pennington and Erik Antonsson UCLA SYMPOSIUM ON DESIGN AND COMPUTATION A WHITE PAPER 26 ______(1997) surveys some recent work in engineering and AI.
58 Examples of potential new application areas include: micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS), biochemical engineering, concurrent representation and manipulation of multiple engineering attributes, solid freeform fabrication (SFF), generation of multiple design alternatives, manufacturing processing plans, assembly and disassembly plans (recycling).
59 Utilizing a grammatical approach to synthesis elevates the work of the designer above the details of an individual design, and instead enables the designer to develop higher level rules (metadesign) that will generate families of designs. Using state-of-the- art CAD systems, industry has made current design processes as efficient as possible. Now it is important to move to a higher level of abstraction, and shape grammars will enable this. Developing design rules in a grammar also provides a formal mechanism for capturing design knowledge, permitting storage and retrieval of design intent, and a formal mechanism to build on prior designs.
60 Given the strong theoretical developments in this field, a significant effort should now be mounted to develop applications in a wide range of fields. This will require that this new activity be administered in a way to provide reward and motivation for interdisciplinary research.
Education 61 Engineering design historically has been taught as an experienced-based one-off informal procedure.20 Grammars introduce a formality to the design process so that design principles can be taught. Thus design education can concentrate on developing and conveying design rules (metadesign) instead of solely providing an experience in generating individual designs. A Summer Institute for instructors in the disciplines in which shape grammars have been applied should be run. This way, a few instructors in the area at UCLA can have enormous leverage by multiplying the effect of their teaching to many more students than they could reach individually. This method of teaching classes for teachers was instrumental in spreading the newly developed digital VLSI design methodology in the mid-1960's.
OVERVIEW20
20 In the early to middle 1960's UCLA had a strong engineering design activity centered in Mechanical Engineering. This work established UCLA as a leader in this area through the published works of Asimow (1962) and others. 20 Notes by Lionel March based on discussions with members of the overview group at the Symposium: Ed Carterette, David Levine, Dwight Read, Russell Kirsch, William Spillers. UCLA SYMPOSIUM ON DESIGN AND COMPUTATION A WHITE PAPER 27 ______62 Many of the revisions made to the draft REPORT presented at the Symposium are due to discussions between members of the overview group. Among members without a professional interest in design, the success of the computational formalisms to convincingly emulate aesthetic objects was seen as an important achievement since this kind of work is generally considered to be ineffable and beyond rigorous study.
The inclusion of examples above (p5) resulted from a lively discussion on this issue. It was also felt that the knowledge of design and the design process gained in the UCLA experience should remain a central concern, and that this need not be in conflict with existing institutional claims. The methodologies related to ‘shape computation’ have potential for very broad application from the traditional design arts to areas in the sciences where shape is becoming an important matter at the supermolecular levels. In the vocabulary of the Symposium, shape is an emergent property of molecular organization. Fractals and symmetry patterns have crossed traditional lines of division between the arts and the sciences in recent years. The grammatical approach taken in ‘shape computation’ is a generalization of these powerful instrumentalities, in the same way that projective geometry includes as special cases Euclidean and affine geometries. Such generalizations assist in the unification of subjects, and this is the expectation here.
63 Some users of existing graphics software were uncertain as to the differences between existing applications of computational geometry and the new approach of ‘shape computation’. The difference is partly technical, yet more deeply philosophical. Conventional approaches tend to be atomistic with fixed hierarchies of spatial objects, the new methodology is nonatomistic and eschews any permanent classifications. The latter is open to ambiguity, and hence the possibility of the unexpected emergence of novelty. There is some tie here with Whitehead’s (1978) appreciation of novelty, and with current neo-pragmatic concerns. Ramifications of this shift in viewpoint are still under investigation (Stiny, 1994, 1998).
64 While the initial emphasis of the Symposium was on research and application, the issue of pedagogy became more insistent as discussions continued. Questions were raised as to how a center might be created in the absence of an undergraduate teaching commitment. The argument was presented that this should be seen as an evolutionary process. New methodologies need to be nurtured at the highest levels of scholarship first. In time, it will be possible to provide undergraduate classes. Indeed, some such classes are already being provided at UCLA, at MIT and Carnegie-Mellon. One possibility is to concentrate on a Ph.D. program first, at the same time opening up some graduate classes as upper division courses for selected seniors. The subject is not elementary: students will need to have a strong intellectual background to take advantage of the materials. It was strongly felt that the methodologies need to be disseminated widely to teachers, instructors, and to industry. The world-wide web offers inexpensive ways of informing viewers of the program and the methodologies. More informative still would be Summer Institutes and specialist Conferences. UCLA SYMPOSIUM ON DESIGN AND COMPUTATION A WHITE PAPER 28 ______65 For funding, it is essential that national agencies and industrial sponsors be brought into the discussion at the earliest stages. However, UCLA must measure the costs, the benefits, and the risks in establishing a center for ‘shape computation’. Here is a chicken and egg situation: three years ago UCLA could boast of its world leadership in Design and Computation. The very first graduate degrees in Design and Computation had received the approval of the Graduate Council, with the doctoral program awaiting system-wide acceptance. Appendix 5 cites part of a proposal, drafted by Professor Eastman in 1993, for a Center for Design and Computation at UCLA, related to these developments. Today, only one or two faculty remain of those who established this reputation. It will be necessary to recruit faculty to establish critical weight in this area once again. A core faculty directly associated with the center will be required to drive this initiative forward, and to provide a focus for affiliates. To build upon UCLA’s reputation, it will be necessary to act promptly before our leadership is irrevocably lost. Most doctoral student in the design and computation option in Architecture and Urban Design have now graduated, and the recruitment has virtually halted. To celebrate UCLA’s twenty-five years of Design and Computation, recent faculty and doctoral contributions are to appear in a theme issue of Design and Planning (March and Knight, 1997) including papers from UCLA, MIT, GATech, NIST, and the Getty. UCLA SYMPOSIUM ON DESIGN AND COMPUTATION A WHITE PAPER 29 ______Appendix I: Commissioning letter Graduate Division 141901 March 21, 1997
Professor Lionel March Department of Design School of the Arts and Architecture Dear Lionel I believe our conversations over the last several months (actually beginning earlier with George Stiny) are leading to a possible approach to what heretofore has been referred to as “design and computation” in an environment of major academic reconfiguration. The idea of a symposium is especially appealing since as a starting point for planning we should grapple with the status of the “shape grammar” discipline. An assessment of the fields of current status may suggest alignments we may not now envision. As you know, former EVC Rich assigned me the role of liaison to the design and computation group (and George Stiny) in a period of her absence from the campus. We remain aware of UCLA’s major role in the development of the field. It is clear that the area now attracts much more interdisciplinary interest than the current label conveys and appears to have applications across a wide variety of fields. In taking next steps, this seems a critical juncture -- one which requires us to achieve a different level of understanding about the field’s potential as an interdisciplinary methodology. The symposium affords an opportunity to hold discussions with UCLA faculty from other areas as well as external participants in the development of the field. For this reason, your proposal is particularly timely. As I indicated, I will be exploring shape grammars with a few administrators at NSF who I anticipate will be interested because of the priority given computational issues across NSF directorates. I believe that there are several people who can contribute valuable advice, not just in terms of funding, but who can help us to situate shape grammars among emerging subject areas in computational science. I suggest a major goal for the symposium should be to prepare a report on the status of the field which would be sent to me as anchor for future planning. I believe this is an achievable goal in the context of the interdisciplinary interactions you have proposed. I would also hope that we can begin to develop a new vocabulary which will help illuminate the potential applications of the methodology beyond its current niche. My conversations with Dean Neuman suggest that both Design and Architecture in the School of the Arts and Architecture are heading in new directions and I have been most encouraged by his support for the rethinking we are undertaking. I am pleased that you have been keeping him abreast of the activity underway and expect to send him an invitation to the symposium when we have a final list of participants. As part of your report, I also would propose that you dedicate some attention to considering an appropriate institutional environment as well as the resource requirements for achieving your appropriately ambitious research and teaching agenda. UCLA SYMPOSIUM ON DESIGN AND COMPUTATION A WHITE PAPER 30 ______
I am pleased to host the symposium and look forward to the opportunity to hear the views of the stellar group you have convening. Susan Townsley will provide staff assistance and I am confident you will find her able and professional. Sincerely
Claudia Mitchell-Kernan Vice-Chancellor, Academic Affairs Dean, Graduate Division UCLA SYMPOSIUM ON DESIGN AND COMPUTATION A WHITE PAPER 31 ______Appendix II Participants’ Biographies
Erik K. Antonsson, Engineering Design Research Laboratory, California Institute of Technology
Erik K. Antonsson received the B.S. degree (with distinction) from Cornell University (1976), and the S.M. (1978) and Ph.D. (1982) degrees from MIT., Cambridge, MA, all in Mechanical Engineering. He was an Instructor and a Research Associate in the Mechanical Engineering Department at MIT. in 1982. In 1983 he joined the Mechanical Engineering faculty at the University of Utah, as an Assistant Professor. In 1984 he became the Technical Director of the Pediatric Mobility and Gait Laboratory, and an Assistant in Bioengineering (Orthopedic Surgery), at the Massachusetts General Hospital. He also simultaneously joined the faculty of the Harvard University Medical School as an Assistant Professor of Orthopedics (Bioengineering).
In September 1984 he joined the faculty of the California Institute of Technology as an Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering, and organized the Engineering Design Research Laboratory. In June, 1990, he was promoted to the rank of Associate Professor, and since January, 1997 he has held the rank of Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Caltech. He teaches courses in engineering design, computer aided engineering design, machine design, mechanical systems, and kinematics. His research interests include application of computation to the preliminary phase of engineering design, representing and manipulating imprecision.
Michael Batty, Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, University College London
Michael Batty is Professor of Spatial Analysis and Planning, and Director of the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA) at University College London (UCL). From 1990 to 1995, he was Director of the National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis (NCGIA) in the State University of New York at Buffalo, where he was also Professor of Geography. From 1979 until 1990, he was Professor of City and Regional Planning in the University of Wales at Cardiff where he acted as the Dean of the School of Environmental Design (1983–86) and Head of the Department (1985–89). From 1969 to 1979, he was Research Assistant, Lecturer, then Reader in Geography in the University of Reading, England. He has also been a Visiting Professor in the University of Waterloo (1974–75), the University of Melbourne (1982), the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (1986), the University of Hong Kong (1986), and the University of Bristol (1994). He acted as a member of the Computer Board for British Universities and Research Councils (1988–90), as Chairman (1980–1982) and Vice-Chairman (1982–84) of the ESRC (Economic and Social Research Council) Environment and Planning Committee, and as a member of the SERC (Science and Engineering Research Council) Transport Committee (1982–85). From 1986 to 1990, he was a CO-Director of the Wales and South West Regional Research Laboratory (WSWRRL).
He is editor of the journal Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design and sits on nine editorial boards of journals concerned with urban studies and planning. His research interests involve the development of computer models and computer graphics in land use and transport planning, the spatial analysis of urban form, geographic information systems (GIS) technology, the impact of information technology on cities, and formal methods of decision-making in policy analysis. He has published Urban Modeling: Algorithms, Calibrations, Predictions (Cambridge University Press, 1976), Microcomputer Graphics: Art, Design and Creative Modeling (Chapman and Hall, 1987), and (with Paul Longley) Fractal Cities: A Geometry of Form and Function (Academic Press, 1994). He has coedited six books on the use of computer models in urban studies and planning, and has published many articles ranging from theories of planning and design to the development of models and computers in planning. His recent publications UCLA SYMPOSIUM ON DESIGN AND COMPUTATION A WHITE PAPER 32 ______have been in four areas: models of urban shape and form using fractal geometry, information infrastructure and its impact on cities, urban information systems in developing countries, the development of spatial analysis and models within GIS, and the applications of virtual reality methods to the built environment.
E. C. Carterette, Department of Psychology, University of California Los Angeles
E C Carterette left the US Army at the age of 25 as a Lt. Colonel of the Adjutant Generals Corps to enter the University of Chicago as a freshman against the advice of Warren McCulloch who wanted him to go to Haverford. Carterette received an A.B. in mathematics from Chicago, was admitted to the Physical Sciences Division to study astrophysics in the hope of eventually working with Chandresekhar at the Williams Bay (Wisconsin) Observatory. As it turned out he transferred to Harvard first in mathematics, then transferred to Psychology in which field he completed an honor’s thesis and received another A. B. in mathematics. After working in the Acoustics Laboratory at MIT and being admitted to graduate work in psychology with J. C. R. Licklider, he went on to finish his MA and Ph.D. at Indiana University in Bloomington where he worked in psychoacoutics with James P. Egan and in mathematical psychology with Cletus Burke and W. K. Estes.
His first appointment was at UCLA, where he worked for some 35 years on general problems of perception and cognition. He recently became Professor of Cognitive Psychology, Emeritus from UCLA. He holds an appointment as Adjunct Professor Ethnomusicology in the School of the Arts and Architecture, UCLA and currently works on aspects of music cognition with Roger A. Kendall. Other activities included being an NSF Postdoctoral Fellow in Physics at the Royal Institute of Technology (Stockholm) and Cambridge University, a visiting professorship at UC Berkeley, and a USPHS Senior Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute of Mathematical Studies in the Social Sciences at Stanford University.
In addition to numerous papers in psychology, he was scientific editor of Brain Function (UC Press, 1968), with Margaret Hubbard Jones wrote Informal Speech (UC Press, 1974) and with Morton P. Friedman was coeditor of the Handbook of Perception (11 volumes, 1968–73) and its second edition as The Handbook of Perception & Cognition (16 volumes, 1994– ). Presently he serves as Associate Editor, Music Perception, and was an Associate Editor of Perception & Psychophysics for over 20 years.
Carterette is a member of the Brain Research Institute, UCLA, and Fellow of a number of societies such as Acoustical Society of America, American Psychological Society, American Society for the Advancement of Science, Society of Experimental Psychology, Society of Music Perception & Cognition, and has been active as a founder and CO-president of the International Conference of Music Perception & Cognition.
Christopher Chippindale, Museum of Archaeology & Anthropology, Cambridge University
Born in 1951, Christopher Chippindale took an archaeology degree at the University of Cambridge, England. One of his teachers was David Clarke, whose interest in formal analysis of artifacts and systems views of human culture evident in his Analytical archaeology (1968) has parallels with the Cambridge architectural formalists of the same era. After ten years book-publishing, he came back to Cambridge as a graduate student. By then David Clarke had died and ––he found –– the Cambridge vogue had moved to structuralism and the starting of the post-moderns.
His Ph.D. work was a study of prehistoric rock-art in the high French Alps. Vivid pictures, they clearly had meaning in their own time, but how was one to know what that had been? The obvious approach, routine in that period when the language analogy was strong, was in terms of meaning and its expression UCLA SYMPOSIUM ON DESIGN AND COMPUTATION A WHITE PAPER 33 ______–– but that is unhappy as a framework in the prehistoric context where, by definition, we can know meaning only insofar as it is visible to us in that expression. Grasping that the main evidence was in the shape of the carved figures, he searched about for a theory of objects which would start from and primarily deal with shape. By chance and by the courteous interest of Russell Kirsch in an inquiry from a complete stranger, he fell across the work of George Stiny (then at the Royal College of Art). He reminds decidedly of the view that the formalists’ attitudes (do we call ourselves “formalists”?) provide the key elements of a fitting theory of objects as they can be studied archaeologically.
After postdoctoral work, he took up a curator’s job at in the Cambridge University Museum of Archaeology & Anthropology and the editorship of Antiquity, regarded as one of the best of the international archaeological journals. There he has published some pioneering papers that have applied architectural access analysis to archaeological materials. But the formalists’ methods, and especially shape grammars, have not caught on as they should have; his own writing hasn’t got past programmatic statements of a program that has not been carried through. (Editing and curating but not teaching, he has no students directly to influence.)
His field studies concern rock-art, both in prehistoric Europe and in Aboriginal north Australia, where he uses informed methods that depend on modern Aboriginal knowledge in complement to elementary and robust formal methods he hopes are in the formalist mode. They work beautifully. The Archaeology of Rock-Art, edited with Paul Taçon and now in press with Cambridge University Press, carries through the scheme to a wider canvas.
He completes his term at Antiquity at the end of 1997, and then takes a role in publishing US archaeological journals. Other of his work concerns changing responses to the past, as evident today in the idea of ‘heritage’, and in the place of fine antiquities in modern artistic regard. He has taken a special interest in Stonehenge, and his Stonehenge Complete is the standard book; he is responsible for archaeological interpretation in the new and ambitious visitor provisions for Stonehenge now in hand.
Not enjoying life as spent on academic committees, he finds himself on virtually none. He begins to have the kind of positions career academics acquire in middle age — Regents’ Lecturer at UCLA (1996), Munro Lecturer at Edinburgh (1997), and so on.
Helen Couclelis, National Center for Geographic Information Analysis, University of California Santa Barbara
Helen Couclelis is Professor of Geography at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She holds a Doctorate from the University of Cambridge, England, a Diploma in Urban and Regional Planning from the Technical University of Munich, Germany, and an MA. equivalent in Architecture from the Technical University of Athens, Greece.
Prior to joining the UCSB Geography Department in 1982, she spent several years as a professional planner and policy advisor in Greece. Former positions include: secretary of the Committee for Urban Development, 15-year National Plan of Greece, Center for Planning and Economic Research (1970–72); assistant project manager of a major planning project involving urban development plans for 20 Nigerian cities, with Doxiadis Associates, Greece (1972–73); and member of a policy advisory group attached to a council of Ministers of the Greek Government responsible for urban, regional, and environmental matters (1977–81). In this latter capacity she has been involved in several national and international policy issues such as: the upgrading of Greek environmental regulations to EC standards; a tri-national agreement UCLA SYMPOSIUM ON DESIGN AND COMPUTATION A WHITE PAPER 34 ______between Greece, Italy, and Yugoslavia on the protection of the Ionian Sea from pollution; the development of the first system of National Forests in the country; and the implementation of the Athens General Plan. She also represented Greece at several European Community and UN meetings and task forces. Dr.. Couclelis has also been a visiting research professor at the Department of Civil Engineering of the University of Waterloo, Canada (1981), a visiting researcher at the Institute of Urban and Regional Development of the University of California at Berkeley (1982), and a visiting Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson School of Princeton University (1987).
The research interests of Dr.. Couclelis are primarily in the areas of urban and planning theory and modeling, in behavioral geography and spatial cognition, and in geographic information theory. Recent research and publications include work on cellular automata models of spatial dynamics, on representations of space in both human cognition and computers, and in the development of GIS-based approaches to help resolve locational conflicts in planning. She is a coeditor of the journal Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design. She has coedited A Ground for Common Search (with P. Gould and R.G. Golledge) and Geographic Information Research: Bridging the Atlantic (with M. Craglia).. She was Associate Director of the National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis (NCGIA) from 1993 to 1996.
Alan de Pennington, Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Leeds
Alan de Pennington studied at UMIST, receiving his B.Sc (1965), M.Sc. (1967) and Ph.D. (1970) from the University of Manchester. Two years were spent working in the Production Automation Group of Philips Research Laboratories in Eindhoven, The Netherlands. He was appointed Professor of Computer of Aided Engineering in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Leeds in 1984. Memberships of national committees include the Advanced Manufacturing Technology Committee of DTI (Department of Trade and Industry/SERC (Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council) between 1991–94.
He co-founded the UK CADCAM Data Exchange Technical Centre (CADDETC) in 1986. He has served as Chairman and a member of a number of other IMechE (Institution of Mechanical Engineers) Committees. Over the 17 years between 1980–97, his research work has been carried out in conjunction with manufacturing companies with support from the Research Councils. It has covered geometric modeling, involvement in an Alvey Large Scale Demonstrator, Design to Product, Information Support Systems for Design and Manufacture and Exploiting Product and Manufacturing Models in Simultaneous Engineering.
As Program Director for Computer Integrated Engineering for the National Science Foundation in Washington DC during 1986/1987, he contributed towards the establishment of a new Division of Design, Manufacturing and Computer Integrated Engineering.
In 1993 he was awarded the OBE (Officer of the Order of the British Empire) in the Queens Birthday Honours for service to the manufacturing industry. In April 1993 he was appointed Engineering at the University of Leeds. This is an inter-disciplinary research institute with five collaborating departments.
His research interests include: modeling in the design process, product data engineering and enterprise integration. Emerging research topics include the interplay between process and the higher levels of abstraction needed in design technology. UCLA SYMPOSIUM ON DESIGN AND COMPUTATION A WHITE PAPER 35 ______
Clive L. Dym, Engineering Design Center, Harvey Mudd College
Clive L. Dym is the Fletcher Jones Professor of Engineering Design at Harvey Mudd College. His interests include design theory, knowledge-based (expert) systems for engineering design, and structural and applied mechanics. He had previously held appointments at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst (1977–91), Bolt Beranek and Newman (1974–77), Carnegie Mellon University (1970–74), Institute for Defense Analyses (1969–70), and the State University of New York at Buffalo (1966–69). Dr.. Dym’s tenure at the University of Massachusetts included eight years as Head of the Department of Civil Engineering (1977–85), during which time the department’s increased research activity and profile were nationally noted. Dr.. Dym has held visiting appointments at the TECHNION-Israel Institute of Technology (1971), the Institute for Sound and Vibration Research at the University of Southampton (1973), Stanford University and Xerox PARC (1983–84), and Carnegie Mellon (1990). He is slated to be the Eshbach Visiting Scholar and Visiting Professor of Civil Engineering at Northwestern University during 1997–98. Dr.. Dym completed the B.S.C.E. at Cooper Union (1964), an M.S. at Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute (1964), and the Ph.D. at Stanford University (1967). He is a Fellow of the Acoustical Society of America, the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, and the American Society of Civil Engineers. Dr.. Dym is a member of the IEEE Computer Society and of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence. He has also won ASCE’s Walter L. Huber Research Prize (1980) and ASEE’s Western Electric Fund Award (1983).
Dr. Dym has published more than 100 archival journal articles, miscellaneous papers and technical reports. He has edited two and written eight books, including: Knowledge-Based Systems in Engineering, McGraw-Hill (1991), coauthored by R. E. Levitt; Engineering Design: A Synthesis of Views, Cambridge University Press (1994); and his most recent work (currently in press), Structural Modeling and Analysis, Cambridge University Press, 1997.
Christopher Francis Earl, Department of Mechanical, Materials and Manufacturing Engineering, University of Newcastle
Christopher Francis Earl gained a BA degree in Mathematics from Oxford University, followed by an M.Sc in General Relativity in Roger Penrose’s group studying new descriptions of the geometry of space time. At the Open University he studied for his Ph.D. under Lionel March on configurational descriptions of designs. Subsequently he held Post Doctoral Research positions and a Faculty appointment (1982–85) to the Department of Design at the Open University, conducting research on the kinematic design of mechanisms and robot manipulators using generative methods. This research continued with applications to Automated Manufacture, Assembly and Construction at University of West of England at Bristol, where Chris led the Manufacturing and Design division in the Faculty of Engineering. Application of parallel computing to intelligent manufacturing was a particular theme of this work. Since 1991 at Newcastle University, in both the Department of Mechanical, Materials and Manufacturing Engineering and Newcastle Engineering Design Centre, Chris has concentrated on shape, design descriptions, associated computational processes, and planning. Currently he is developing interdisciplinary work with the Departments of Planning and Management. He has led, or contributed to, several Research Council, European Union and Industry sponsored research projects in Design, particularly in the areas of Geometric Features, Shape, and Generative Design with applications in Mechanical Design, Manufacture and Assembly. UCLA SYMPOSIUM ON DESIGN AND COMPUTATION A WHITE PAPER 36 ______
Susan Finger, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Carnegie Mellon University
Susan Finger is on the faculty of the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department at Carnegie Mellon University. She is also affiliated with the Engineering Design Research Center, the Robotics Institute, and the Department of Mechanical Engineering. Dr.. Finger received her B.A. in Astronomy from the University of Pennsylvania in 1972, her M.A. in Operations Research from the University of Pennsylvania in 1974, and her Ph.D. in Electric Power Systems through Civil Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1981. She was on the faculty in Manufacturing Engineering at Boston University and was a Visiting Assistant Professor in Mechanical Engineering in the Laboratory for Manufacturing Productivity at MIT. In 1985, she went to the National Science Foundation as the Program Director for a new research program in Design Theory and Methodology. In 1987, she joined the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon where she was a member of the research faculty until the fall of 1991. She serves on numerous advisory boards and review panels and, with John Dixon, is a founder and Co- editor-in-Chief of the journal Research in Engineering Design. Dr.. Finger’s research interests include representation languages for designs and integration of design and manufacturing concerns.
Ulrich Flemming, Department of Architecture, Carnegie Mellon University
Ulrich Flemming received his professional degree in architecture from the Technical University of Berlin, where he worked in close association with O. M. Ungers, whose Berlin office he managed for one year before joining the graduate Master’s program at MIT. He returned to Berlin for his Ph.D. in computational architectural design, which introduced a formal representation of rectangular floor plans that has become widely used since.
He has been living and working in the U.S since the mid-seventies, first at SUNY Buffalo, later - and to the present day - at CMU in Pittsburgh. He has held guest appointments at UCLA and the Technical University of Denmark.
He has been teaching professional courses, especially design studios, at each of the universities where he held permanent appointments. At CMU, he succeeded Chuck Eastman in leading the research group and Ph. D. concentration in computational design. He became associated with the Engineering Design Center (EDRC), where he lead the ‘form/function synthesis thrust’ and generally participated in interdisciplinary research.
His research was initially focussed on generative design systems, where he made contributions not only to the geometry of layouts, but also to the application of shape grammars to the analysis of corpora of designs in that early phase where this applicability needed to be established. His research has since branched out to include knowledge-based design systems (including case-based design), integrated design systems, design databases, design space navigation, and human/computer interaction in design and drafting. This branching out has been motivated not only by intellectual curiosity, but also by the practical necessities that come with working in an externally funded research program. He has published widely in all of these areas.
James Gips, Computer Science Department, Boston College UCLA SYMPOSIUM ON DESIGN AND COMPUTATION A WHITE PAPER 37 ______James Gips received an S.B. from MIT in 1967. At MIT he worked on three projects on the generation and recognition of shapes with George Stiny, a fellow undergraduate. He received an M.S. In Computer Science from Stanford in 1968. From 1968 through 1970 he worked at the National Institutes of Health. In 1970 he and George Stiny spent three months in Los Angeles developing the idea of a shape grammar. The resulting paper, “Shape Grammars and the Algorithmic Specification of Painting and Sculpture”, was presented at IFIPS Congress ‘71, the major international conference in Computer Science, in Ljubljana, Yugoslavia, where it was awarded the prize for “Best Submitted Paper”.
In 1974 he received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford. His dissertation, Shape Grammars and their Uses, was published by Birkhaüser Verlag in 1975. From 1974 through 1976 he held an appointment at the Department of Biomathematics in the School of Medicine at UCLA. During that time he worked with George Stiny developing ideas in aesthetics and design. The resulting book, Algorithmic Aesthetics: Computer Models for Criticism and Design in the Arts, was published by University of California Press in 1978 and received the Alpha Sigma Nu Book Award.
Since 1976 Professor Gips has been on the faculty of the Computer Science Department at Boston College. He has served as a consultant for Arthur D. Little, Asian Development Bank, Chase Manhattan Bank, Digital Equipment, General Electric, McGraw-Hill, Standard & Poor’s, and State Street Bank. He is the author of the textbooks Mastering Lotus 1-2–3 (1991) and Mastering Excel (1997) published by John Wiley.
His current research involves the design and implementation of new technologies for use by people with profound physical disabilities. He is the principal inventor of EagleEyes, a technology that allows a person to control the cursor on the screen of the computer through five electrodes attached to the face. Two dozen children who are unable to voluntarily move any parts of their body below their neck and are unable to speak are using EagleEyes to control the computer by moving their eyes and head. EagleEyes was a finalist in the 1994 Discover magazine Technological Innovation of the Year award and has been featured in the New York Times, the Times of London, the Los Angeles Times, the Disney channel, and other media. Currently Professor Gips also is working on the design of novel means for controlling computerized wheelchairs.
Michael Jura, Department of Physics and Astrophysics, University of California Los Angeles
Michael Jura received his B.A. in Physics from the University of California, Berkeley in 1967. He then went to Harvard University and received his Ph.D. in Astronomy in 1971. After two years in the U.S. Army and a one year postdoctoral job at Princeton, he came to UCLA in 1974. Since then, he has spent two summers at Princeton and one summer in Paris, but otherwise he has been at UCLA.
During the 1970's and mid-1980's, he mainly worked on observations and models for the interstellar medium of the Milky Way and other galaxies, but now he mainly studies the circumstellar matter around red giant stars. He is particularly interested in “low energy” astrophysics –– systems with molecules and solid dust grains. One of his goals is to improve our understanding of how stars and planets form and how they die.
In addition to his own research, since 1984, he has worked as an Interdisciplinary Scientist on NASA’s proposed SIRTF (Space Infrared Telescope Facility) –– the next major project to perform observations at infrared wavelengths by going beyond the contamination of the Earth’s atmosphere. From 1991–97, he was an Associate Editor for the Astrophysical Journal Letters. At UCLA, he was Chair of the Astronomy Department from 1987–92, Chair of the Committee on Committees during 1993–94 and, pending official approval by the Legislative Assembly, he will be Chair of the Graduate Council for 1997–98. UCLA SYMPOSIUM ON DESIGN AND COMPUTATION A WHITE PAPER 38 ______
Russell A. Kirsch, National Institute of Standards and Technology and Sturvil Corporation
Russell A. Kirsch received his scientific training from the Bronx High School of Science, graduating in 1946. Subsequent refinements occurred at New York University (B.E.E. 1950), Harvard University (S.M. 1952), American University, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
He was a member of the group that first designed and built digital computers in the U.S. Federal Government at the National Bureau of Standards (NBS) where he was responsible for computer design, operation, training, programming, and research for thirty-three years beginning in 1951. He retired as head of Artificial Intelligence research in 1985 to become Director of Research of the Sturvil Corporation, a non-profit public interest corporation active in government information research and in computers in the fine arts. He also still maintains an emeritus affiliation with NBS (now called National Institute of Standards and Technology).
Over the years he has collaborated with U.S. Government agencies to design and introduce computers into the Departments of Commerce, Defense, Energy, Education, Health and Human Services, Housing and Urban Development, State, Treasury and many independent agencies. He is finally convinced that the operation of the Federal Government is a mystery.
He published the results of his research in papers that started the computer fields of Image Processing (1957), Syntactic Pattern Recognition(1964), and Chemical Structure Searching (1957). He was among the early workers in the use of computers in Natural Language Processing, Library Science, Time Sharing, Biomedicine, Artificial Intelligence, and Security Printing. He is a past Advisory Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence and currently Advisory Editor of the journal Languages of Design. He has been chair of various conferences on Pattern Recognition and Image Processing and Artificial Intelligence. He is a member of the IEEE, the Association for Computing Machinery, and The American Association for the Advancement of Science. His current research interests are mainly in the use of computers in the fine arts and in studying ancient petroglyphs. With his wife, Joan L. Kirsch, an art historian and printmaker (whom he courted while they were inside the first computer) he has been collaborating on research to teach computers part of what we know about recognizing style in paintings. He feels that the computer is an adequately expressive medium not only for making new art, but, rather, for expressing what we know about existing art and doing so in such a way as to enable our insights to be tested the way scientific theories are usually tested.
Terry Knight, School of Architecture and Planning, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Terry Knight received a B.F.A. from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, and an M.A. and Ph.D. from the Architecture and Urban Design program at UCLA. Her graduate work at UCLA focused on shape grammars. In her Ph.D. of 1986, she developed a model for describing stylistic change and innovation in design through transformations of grammars. This work was elaborated on in her recent book Transformations in Design.
From 1988 to 1995, she was a faculty member in the Architecture and Urban Design program at UCLA. She is currently an Associate Professor with tenure in the School of Architecture and Planning at MIT.
Ms. Knight has published numerous papers on grammars. She developed color grammars, a generalization of shape grammars which incorporates non-compositional aspects of designs. Her recent UCLA SYMPOSIUM ON DESIGN AND COMPUTATION A WHITE PAPER 39 ______work examines the practical and theoretical issues involved in implementing shape grammars and color grammars in design practice.
Ramesh Krishnamurti, Department of Architecture, Carnegie Mellon University
Ramesh Krishnamurti read Electrical Engineering at the University of Madras and Computer Science at (what is now) the University of Canberra, Australia graduating with honours. He was admitted to the graduate program in Systems Design at the University of Waterloo, Canada, earning his Ph.D. in 1980.
In 1978 at the invitation of Lionel March, he went to The Open University’s Centre for Configurational Studies where he worked primarily on spatial enumeration problems and shape grammar implementation. In 1984, at Aart Bijl’s invitation, he went to the University of Edinburgh’s EdCAAD group to work on the application of artificial intelligence to architectural design and the integration of graphics and natural language. In 1988, he briefly left academia to work at Bolt Beranek and Newman (Scotland) on semantic modeling and war game simulation. In September 1989 he joined Carnegie Mellon University where he is currently a Professor in Architecture.
He was a project reviewer (1986–89) of the European Strategic Programme for Information Technology (ESPRIT). He has been a regular reviewer for the journal Planning and Design. He is a member of the editorial advisory board for Languages of Design and is the Regional Editor (Americas) of the international journal Building and Environment.
David Levine, Department of Economics, University of California Los Angeles
David K. Levine is a professor in the Department of Economics at UCLA. He received his undergraduate degree in Mathematics from UCLA in 1979, and was the recipient of the Daus Prize. At the same time he received a Master’s degree in Economics. His graduate training was completed at MIT in 1981 with a dissertation examining learning in repeated games. In the early 1980's David worked with Timothy Kehoe on determinacy and indeterminacy in dynamic general equilibrium models. They and their collaborators established a series of results, showing that with a finite number of infinitely-lived traders local determinacy is generic, but that with overlapping generations of consumers or other frictions there can be a robust continuum of equilibrium converging to the same steady state. Later research by Azariadis, Benhabib, Farmer and others have used models with a robust continuum of equilibria due to increasing returns to scale in an effort to explain a variety of macroeconomic phenomena. In recent years, Kehoe and Levine have focused on the issue of asset market imperfections.
Since his dissertation, David has continued to do research on dynamic games. Work in the mid-80s with Drew Fudenberg established that a long-lived player playing against short- lived opponents could substitute reputation for precommitment. Together with Eric Maskin, they established the first “folk theorem” for games in which players do not directly observe each other’s decisions. Their recent research has returned to the issue of learning in games, culminating in a book soon to be published by MIT Press.
In addition to teaching at UCLA, David taught at the University of Minnesota in 1987–88 and study of asset pricing in dynamic general equilibrium models, learning in games, and the application of game theory to experimental economics. At the graduate level, his teaching focuses on dynamic games; at the undergraduate level, he teaches intermediate level microeconomics, including elementary game theory and static general equilibrium . UCLA SYMPOSIUM ON DESIGN AND COMPUTATION A WHITE PAPER 40 ______
Robin Liggett, Department of Architecture and Urban Planning, University of California Los Angeles
Robin Liggett holds a joint appointment between the Department of Architecture in the School of the Arts and Architecture and the Department of Urban Planning in the new School of Public Policy and Social Research at UCLA. For over twenty years she has been teaching courses in quantitative methods and computer applications in Architecture and Urban Planning. Her research emphasizes the development of interactive computer graphic aides to design and decision making. She has focused on algorithms for optimal space allocation in the facilities management field and on methods of parametric design.
Professor Liggett received her B.A. in Mathematics from Pomona College, and her M.S. and Ph.D. in Operations Research from the Graduate School of Management, UCLA. She was the 1982 recipient of the UCLA Alumni Association Distinguished Teaching Award and the Harvey L. Eby Award for the Art of Teaching. She is the coauthor of the text, The Art of Computer Graphics Programming (Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1987). More recent publications have focused on issues of optimization in design and tools for real-time 3-D visual simulation of urban environments. Professor Liggett is active in consulting and software development in the facilities management area. Her product, WinSABA (a windows based stacking and blocking algorithm), is considered “state-of-the-art” in the commercial world.
Lionel March, Department of Design, University of California Los Angeles
On the personal recommendation of Alan Turing, Lionel March was admitted to Magdalene College, University of Cambridge, to read mathematics under Dennis Babbage. There he eventually gained a first class degree in mathematics and architecture. In the early sixties, he was awarded an Harkness Fellowship of the Commonwealth Fund at the Joint Center for Urban Studies, Harvard University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He returned to Cambridge and joined Sir Leslie Martin and Sir Colin Buchanan in preparing a plan for a national and government center for Whitehall. He was the first Director of the Centre for Land Studies, Cambridge University. As founding Chairman of the Board of the private computer- aided design company, Applied Research of Cambridge (later owned by McDonnell Douglas), he and his colleagues were among the first contributors to the ‘Cambridge Phenomenon’ –– the dissemination of Cambridge scholarship into high-tech industries. IN 1978, he was awarded the Doctor of Science degree for mathematical and computational studies related to contemporary architectural and urban problems.
Before coming to Los Angeles, he was Rector and Vice-Provost of the Royal College of Art, London. During his Rectorship, he served as a Governor of Imperial College of Science and Technology. He has held full Professorships in Systems Engineering at the University of Waterloo, Ontario; and in Design Technology at The Open University, Milton Keynes. At The Open University, as Chair, he doubled the faculty in Design and established the Centre for Configurational Studies. He can to UCLA In 1984. He was Chair of the Architecture and Urban Design program from 1985-91. He is currently a Professor in Design and Computation, School of the Arts and Architecture. He was a member of UCLA’s Council on Academic Personnel from 1993, and its chair for 1995-96.
He is General Editor of Cambridge Architectural and Urban Studies (1972 – ), and Founding Editor of the journal Planning and Design (1974 – ). Among the books he has authored and edited are: The Geometry of UCLA SYMPOSIUM ON DESIGN AND COMPUTATION A WHITE PAPER 41 ______Environment, Urban Space and Structures, The Architecture of Form, and R. M. Schindler: Composition and Construction. He is currently completing a companion volume to Sir Rudolf Wittkower’s Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism entitled Architectonics of Humanism to be published in 1997.
D. Stott Parker, Computer Science Department, University of California Los Angeles
Stott Parker received the A.B. in Mathematics from Princeton in 1974. He completed his M.S. and Ph.D. at the University of Illinois at Urbana in 1976 and 1978, respectively. Following a period of postdoctoral research at the Université de Grenoble in France, he joined the Faculty of the UCLA Computer Science Department in 1979.
His general areas of interest are database and knowledge-based systems, logic programming, term rewriting and constraint processing, combinatorial optimization, scientific computing.
Current interests center around integration of modern methods for optimization and processing of constraints with database systems; applications in decision support, OLAP, data mining, and scientific data management. A specific interest is partial order programming, a term-rewriting and constraint- based framework for multiobjective optimization.
Dwight Read, Department of Anthropology, University of California Los Angeles
Dwight W. Read received his Ph.D. degree in mathematics at UCLA. His dissertation, in the area of Boolean Algebras, was acclaimed to be With Honors by his dissertation committee. Though his degree work was in pure mathematics, he began his professional life in another discipline, anthropology. Immediately following receipt of the Ph.D. degree he began teaching with a position in the Department of Anthropology at UCLA where he is currently Professor of Anthropology.
While a graduate student, he taught for a year in the Mathematics Department at CSNU, was employed as a statistician for a year at the Centre Des Hautes Etudes Urbaines, Paris and participated in archaeological fieldwork in the Perigord region of southwestern France. After his appointment in the Anthropology Department at UCLA, he became a Co-Principal Investigator in a large, multi-year, NSF supported archaeological project in Arizona and has served as a statistical consultant on a number of archaeological projects in California and the Southwest. More recently, his work on computer based mathematical modeling of kinship terminology structures led to a two-year position as a Visiting Scientist with the IBM Science Center in Los Angeles.
He was Vice Chair of the Department of Anthropology from 1990–92. He has been Chair of UCLA’s Committee on Academic Freedom, twice been selected as Chair of the UCLA’s Privilege and Tenure, was selected as Chair of the statewide Privilege and Tenure Committee, and is now Chair of UCLA’s Council on Planning and Budget and the UCLA representative to the statewide University Council on Planning and Budget (and will be Vice Chair of that Council beginning in Fall 1997). He is both Archaeology Editor for the Journal of Quantitative Anthropology and on its advisory board. He is on the Advisory Board for the Sage Series of Advanced Statistical Monographs, and was selected as a reviewer for Mathematical Abstracts for papers relating to the social sciences. UCLA SYMPOSIUM ON DESIGN AND COMPUTATION A WHITE PAPER 42 ______He has published extensively in archaeology, biological anthropology and sociocultural anthropology with a focus on mathematical modeling. His archaeological publications have dealt with the interplay between the conceptual framework underlying classification and quantitative methods, and has included work on the application of shape grammars to analysis of hominid fossil data aimed at reconstruction of the hominid phylogeny. His current research in sociocultural anthropology integrates his mathematical background in abstract algebras, especially semigroups, with the central anthropological problem of developing an adequate explanatory theory of kinship systems and the culturally defined, conceptual structures expressed in the form of kinship terminologies. He is currently working on a computer program that uses an extensive graphical interface and embedded “expert system” to make feasible the mathematical modeling of kinship terminology structures by the mathematically “naive” anthropologist.
William Spillers, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, New Jersey Institute of Technology
William Spillers is a structural engineer by trade with BS/MS degrees from Berkeley in Civil Engineering in 1955–56. After working briefly in San Francisco he returned to school going to Columbia University where he worked in continuum mechanics under A. M. Freudenthal and received a Ph.D. in 1961. In 1976 he left Columbia for Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute; in 1990 he moved to the New Jersey Institute of Technology where he is a distinguished professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering and chair of the department.
Spillers’ career has revolved about structural engineering where he has moved from Automated Structural Analysis (Pergamon Press, 1972) to optimal design (Iterative Structural Design, N. Holland, 1975), and to nonlinear structural analysis (Analysis of Geometrically Nonlinear Structures, Chapman & Hall, 1994, with R. Levy). This has allowed him to become involved with major structures such as the John Hancock Building in Chicago. During this period he also worked with David Geiger and Horst Berger helping to develop the contemporary field of fabric structures.
In 1974 Spillers organized NSF’s first effort in the area of design theory (Basic Questions of Design Theory, N. Holland) which in turn fostered in him a lifelong interest in the formal aspects of engineering design. Presently, he is concerned with the role of ambiguity in design theory.
George Stiny, School of Architecture and Planning, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
George Stiny is Professor of Design and Computation at MIT. He has held academic positions at UCLA (Professor of Design and Professor of Architecture and Urban Design), at the Royal College of Art (Dean), and at the Open University. He received an S.B. in Humanities and Engineering from MIT, and an M.S. and Ph.D. from UCLA in Engineering.
Professor Stiny pioneered the field of shape grammars, opening numerous lines of research in shape computation, design, and aesthetic and stylistic analysis. His current work focuses on the uses of ambiguity in computations with shapes, and on the extension of the shape grammar formalism to embrace a multiplicity of interacting descriptive devices. He is looking for answers to questions about the relationships among shape, structure, and physical and intentional properties. UCLA SYMPOSIUM ON DESIGN AND COMPUTATION A WHITE PAPER 43 ______
Mark Tapia, Design Computation, University of California Los Angeles
Taking a circuitous route to academia, Mark Tapia received his B.S. in Mathematics from Stanford University in 1969 and an M.Sc. in Computer Science from the University of Toronto in 1971. He then worked in a variety of positions in academia and industry, focusing on the concerns of the end–user and acting as a liaison between technical issues and user needs, advising users on computer systems, developing software for student use, guiding the technical issues and interface issues of pilot projects to provide electronic mail in the financial and academic sectors, and managing a large software project to provide real-time public transit information to riders. Deciding that his training needed to be updated and challenged, he returned to the University of Toronto full time to test the waters. After completing four graduate level courses, he was accepted as a Ph.D. candidate in the Computer Science Department where he pursued his interest in human computer interaction, receiving his Ph.D. in 1996.
A search for a topic combining an interest in the architecture and computer science revealed an article by Ulrich Flemming on shape grammars and Queen Anne houses. Spurred by this article and others, he visited UCLA where he met with George Stiny at the Graduate School of Architecture and Urban Design. With George’s encouragement, he conducted research as a Visiting Scholar at UCLA. The dissertation treated the computer implementation of shape grammars systems as a complete system, addressing the problems of representation and computation, and presentation and selection.
With his specific interest in shape grammars and his more general interest in the philosophy and practice of design computation, he has taught courses in design and architecture as a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Design Department at the UCLA. He is currently a Visiting Assistant Researcher in Design and Computation. He is a member of the Association of Computing Machinery and its Special Interest Group on Computers and Human Interaction.
Visitors from the National Science Foundation
Steve Griffin, Division of Information, Robotics and Intelligent Systems, National Science Foundation
Stephen M. Griffin is a Program Manager in the Division of Information, Robotics and Intelligent Systems at the National Science Foundation (NSF). He is currently Program Director of the Digital Libraries Initiative, sponsored jointly with the Department of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).
Prior to his current assignment, he served in several research divisions, including the Divisions of Chemistry and Advanced Scientific Computing, the Office of the Assistant Director, Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering, and staff offices of the Director of the NSF. His responsibilities included program planning, development, analysis and assessment. He has initiated numerous activities directed at building topical research communities, and support and coordination for new areas of interdisciplinary research. Mr. Griffin has been active in the Federal High Performance Computing and Communications Program (HPCC), authoring and editing HPCC publication material and serving as Executive Secretary of the Information Infrastructure Technologies and Applications Working Group. UCLA SYMPOSIUM ON DESIGN AND COMPUTATION A WHITE PAPER 44 ______His educational background includes degrees in Chemical Engineering and Information Systems Technology. He has additional graduate education in organizational behavior and development and the philosophy of science. His research interests are in topics related to interdisciplinary communication.
Toni Kazic, Institute for Biomedical Computing & Computational Biology Activity Washington University, St. Louis, MO & National Science Foundation, Arlington, VA.
Throughout her academic and research career, Toni Kazic has focused on applying computational techniques to the study of biochemical phenomena, in a variety of guises. She received a B.S. in Microbiology in 1975 from the University of Illinois, Urbana, Illinois and a Ph.D. in Genetics from the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia in 1984. Her dissertation described the cloning, mapping and sequencing of the purine biosynthetic locus of e.coli.
In 1990, as a Visiting scientist, Mathematics and Computer Science Division at the Argonne National Laboratory, Toni Kazic began to develop her skills in computer science, mathematical logic, and computational linguistics first applying in the preliminary design of biochemical databases. Positions prior to that focused on work arising from the dissertation: as a Research associate, Department of Molecular Microbiology, Washington University (1986-1989), analyzing deletion formation in e.coli, developing a method for simultaneously measuring growth rates and mutation frequencies of hundreds of cultures, and determining that the translation of the tetracycline-resistance protein is essential for supercoiling in pBR322, perhaps by anchoring the protein in the cellular membrane; and as a Postdoctoral fellow, Institute for Cancer Research, Fox Chase Cancer Center, identifying, characterizing, and sequencing a hyper-recombinant allele of the e.coli uracil-DNA glycosylase gene. After developing her computational expertise, she was a Consultant, Division of Computer Research and Technology, National Institutes of Health (1991), using logic programming to analyze genomic data of e.coli, human chromosome 21, and drosophilia (the common housefly).
Toni Kazic is the Program Director, Computational Biology Activity, National Science Foundation (1996-97) and, .since 1992, Instructor in the Institute for Biomedical Computing, Washington University. As an independent investigator, she analyzes the organization of networks of biochemical reactions elucidating their design, function, and dynamics, and the constraints on their modification. She has developed an explicit semantics for biochemical information. Utilizing graph grammars and, graph theory, she has developed representations for biochemical reactions and molecular structures, specified and recognized patterns of biochemical functions,and partitioned and characterized their dynamics.
As a Founding member,Toni Kazic is on the editorial board of the Internet Journal of Chemistry (1996-- present). She is a member and reviewer for the Metacenter and SDSC allocations committees (1997); NIH Special Study , Section 9, Multidisciplinary Special Emphases Panel (1994--present); a reviewer for proposals National Science Foundation, Department of Energy, and National Library of Medicine (1992--present). UCLA SYMPOSIUM ON DESIGN AND COMPUTATION A WHITE PAPER 45 ______Appendix III: Bibliography
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Handbook of Perception, Volume X, (Academic Press, New York, NY) 133-152 Stiny G, 1980a, “Introduction to shape and shape grammars” Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design 7 343-351 Stiny G, 1980b, “Kindergarten grammars: designing with Froebel’s building gifts” Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design 7 409-462 Stiny G, 1981, “A note on the description of designs” Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design 8 257-267 Stiny G, 1982a, “Shapes are individuals” Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design 9 359-367 Stiny G, 1982b, “Spatial relations and grammars” Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design 9 113-114 Stiny G, 1985, “Computing with form and meaning in architecture” Journal of Architectural Education, 39(1) 7-19 Stiny G, 1986, “A new line on drafting systems” Design Computing 1 5-19 Stiny G, 1987, “Composition counts: A+E = AE” Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design 14 167-182 Stiny G, 1989, “Formal devices in design” in S A Newsome, W R Spillers and S Finger S (eds.) Design UCLA SYMPOSIUM ON DESIGN AND COMPUTATION A WHITE PAPER 52 ______Theory 88 (New York: Springer-Verlag) 173-188 Stiny G, 1990a, “What designers do that computers should” in McCullough, Mitchell and Purcell (eds.) The Electronic Design Studio: Architectural Knowledge and Media in the Computer Era (MIT Press:Cambridge,MA) Stiny G, 1990b,”What is design?” Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design 17 97-103 Stiny G, 1991,”The algebras of design” Research in Engineering Design 2 (3) 171-181 Stiny G, 1992, “Weights” Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design 19 413-430 Stiny G, 1993, “Boolean algebra for shapes and individuals” Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design 20 359-362 Stiny G, 1994, “Shape rules: closure, continuity and emergensce” Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design 21, s49-s78 Stiny G, 1998 Shape: A Primer in Algebra, Grammar and Description (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK) in preparation Stiny G, Gips J, 1972, “Shape Grammars and the Generative Specification of Painting and Sculpture” in C V Freiman editor Information Processing 71 (Amsterdam: North-Holland) 1460-1465 Stiny G, Gips J, 1978a Algorithmic Aesthetics: Computer Models for Criticism and Design in the Arts (University of California Press, Berkeley, CA) Stiny G, Gips J, 1978b, “An evaluation of Palladian plans” Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design 5 199-206 Stiny G, Gips J, 1980, “Production systems and grammars: a uniform characterization” Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design 7 399-408 Stiny G, March L, 1981, “Design machines” Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design 8 245-255 Stiny G, Mitchell W J, 1978a, “The Palladian Grammar” Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design 5 5-18 Stiny G, Mitchell W J, 1978b, “Counting Palladian plans” Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design 5 189-198 Stiny G, Mitchell W J, 1980, “The grammar of paradise: on the generation of Mughal gardens” Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design 7 209-226 Stone R, 1966 Mathematics in the Social Sciences, and other essays (Chapman and Hall, London, UK) Stouffs R, 1994 The Algebra of Shapes , Ph.D. Dissertation, Department of Architecture, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh Stouffs R, Krishnamurti R, 1993, “The complexity of the maximal representation of shapes” Proceedings of the IFIP Workshop on Formal Methods for Computer-Aided Design, Talinin, Estonia, June 16-19, 53-66 Stouffs R, Krishnamurti R, 1994, “An algebraic approach to shape computation” (Position Paper) Workshop on Reasoning with Shapes in Design, Artificial Intelligence in Design’94, Lausanne, Switzerland, August 15-18 1994, 50-55 Tapia M A, 1992, “Chinese lattice designs and parametric shape grammars” The Visual Computer 9 47-56 Tapia M A, 1996, From Shape to Style Shape Grammars: Issues in Representation and Computation, Presentation and Selection , Ph.D. Dissertation, Department of Computer Science,University of Toronto, Toronto 1996 Tobler W, 1979, “Cellular geography”, in S Gale and G Olsson editorsPhilosophy in Geography, (D. Reidel Publishing Company, Dordrecht, Holland), pp. 379-386 Tribus M, 1969 Rational Descriptions, Decisions and Designs (Pergamon Press, Oxford, UK Wells A B, 1994, Grammars for Engineering Design, Ph.D. dissertation, California Institute of Technology, UCLA SYMPOSIUM ON DESIGN AND COMPUTATION A WHITE PAPER 53 ______Pasadena, CA Whitehead A N, 1978, Process and Reality Corrected Edition Eds D R Griffin, D W Sherburne (The Free Press, New York) Wittgenstein, L (1991) Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics G H von Wright, R Rhees, G E M Anscombe (eds.) (The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA) Wolchko M J, 1987, “Designing by zoning code: the New Jersey office building” in Y E Kalay editor Computability of Designs (New York: John Wiley & Sons) 273-292 UCLA SYMPOSIUM ON DESIGN AND COMPUTATION A WHITE PAPER 54 ______
Appendix IV: Prospectus for the Symposium
INTRODUCTION By design is meant a discipline which Herbert Simon described, thirty years ago, in his MIT Compton Lectures The Sciences of the Artificial as “a body of intellectually tough, analytic, partly formalizable, partly empirical, teachable doctrine about the design process”. Such a process is social and takes place within the context of technological possibilities, market realities and cultural values. While design can apply to many things, here it is specifically concerned with material objects which have shape. The design process, as traditionally conceived, includes: • recognition of needs and opportunities for design innovation • formulation of a design response • representation of design options • evaluation of design options • selection of a preferred design • specification for manufacture, or construction • implementation as a product • marketing of the product • maintenance, removal, destruction, or recycling. Overarching this process, from the strategic to the tactical, are design policy, design planning and design management. In the past this process has been seen as largely sequential and discrete. Today, with computing and automation, there is a move to make much of the process concurrent and continuing over the life of a product. Designs as products include a multitude of diverse and connected parts. Design as process seeks to develop parts and connections, forming them into a complete product.
By computation is meant those intellectual developments which have been signposted by the achievements of Boole, Stone, Turing, Post, Markov, Church, among many others. Computation is understood as a theoretical enterprise, in contradistinction to computing which is its practical embodiment. While the two are inexorably related, the theoretical foundations of computing are often overlooked in the study of the design process. The result in some fields is that pre-computational methods of design are being computerized, even automated, without gaining the full benefits of a reassessment of the process as a whole in terms of advances in computational theory. Computing as a supporting technology is succeeded by computation which pulls together themes of design as product and design as process. All indications suggest that the traditional parsing of the design process is about to undergo a paradigmatic transformation. COMMENTARY Shape is characteristic of all physical, material design. The single, most significant UCLA SYMPOSIUM ON DESIGN AND COMPUTATION A WHITE PAPER 55 ______development in computational theory in regard to shape, took place 25 years ago at UCLA with the introduction of shape grammars by George Stiny in the System Science Department in part collaboration with James Gips at Stanford’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Stiny is now at MIT, Gips at Boston College. In Pictorial and Formal Aspects of Shape, Shape Grammars and Aesthetic Systems, Stiny proved that a shape grammar was a Turing machine. UCLA psychologist, Ed Carterette, described the thesis as “a bold anfractuous rock”. Stiny and Gips’ prize-winning book Algorithmic Aesthetics: Computer Models for Criticism and Design in the Arts was published by the University of California Press in 1978. In his review, UCR philosopher, David Harrah, suggested that the Stiny- Gips model of aesthetics “is probably best construed as an analog of Church’s Thesis”. In her UCLA doctoral thesis of 1986, Terry Knight, uses the recursive structure of shape grammars to examine stylist transformations in the visual arts with examples drawn from art, design and architecture. Her studies are beautifully brought together in her 1994 book Transformations in Design: a Formal Approach to Stylistic Change and Innovation in the Visual Arts. Knight is now at MIT.
In their 1980 paper, Gips and Stiny showed how shape grammars related to, but differed from, other production systems. In particular, most systems deal with strings, lists or arrays of discrete symbols; but a shape grammar deals with geometrical entities which are continuous. A consequence, which was not originally appreciated, is that shape grammars have no fixed vocabulary. They are non-atomistic. March and Stiny summarized the new design and computation paradigm in their 1981 paper ‘Design machines’. Here the steps of the design process become generic and are recursively defined. In 1985, the relationship of this new approach to traditional design methods was sketched in March and Stiny ‘Spatial systems in architecture and design: some history and logic’.
Historically, several separate strands of research converged on the field of Design and Computation as it became defined by those associated with the group at UCLA:
• the shape grammar approach and its algebras is undoubtedly the most original and the most fundamental • spatial transformations - the architectonics of design - underlie the key subshape recognition problem • closely related is the study of spatial configurations with an emphasis on population characteristics rather than individual description • in turn the study of populations of designs leads to evaluative procedures, multiple descriptions and partial orderings; and to network representations which carry non- spatial information about shapes • finally, there are grammatical methods of handling non-spatial attributes associated with shapes. The complexity of design possibilities compounded with the plurality of descriptions by agents in the process makes these ‘structural’ representations key components in a computational view of design. The ‘design machine’ requires the parallel computation UCLA SYMPOSIUM ON DESIGN AND COMPUTATION A WHITE PAPER 56 ______of multiple descriptions (equivalent to communication between different agents in the design process, with distinct viewpoints, and peculiar dialects, or professional languages). This leads to problems in large-scale, multi-user data management. Perhaps the difference here is that while most data management systems work extensionally, the shape grammar approach works intentionally and offers the possibility of significant data reduction through its algorithmic derivations (that is, the rules required to generate a design may well be computationally more economical than any specific, individual description). Most significantly, the approach does not restructure information, but allows for structuring to occur contingent on current interest as an outcome of the computational process. While conserving computational continuity, this permits the emergence of unforeseen relationships and correspondences. Even the simplest of shape grammars may exhibit ‘miraculous’ behavior.
Over the past twenty-five years, some aspects of the Design and Computation approach have found applications in art, design, architecture, archaeology, urban planning, geography, engineering. Studies have ranged from the historical to innovative, from critical to constructive.
A NEW INITIATIVE This initiative proposes the creation of a new unit, similar to an Interdepartmental Program, focused on doctoral studies and research in Design and Computation. In this way, UCLA’s quarter-century investment in these studies will continue to be realized here, along with preserving and enhancing the substantial reputation that UCLA already has in this field. In order to promote this initiative, the Vice Chancellor, Academic Affairs, is sponsoring a Symposium in the Spring Quarter 1997 to include internationally recognized scholars from outside UCLA, and faculty from cognate fields within the University of California.
PURPOSE OF THE SYMPOSIUM The purpose of the Symposium is to • review the current standing of the field of Design and Computation • examine the appropriateness of the Interdepartmental Program formula • explore likely interdepartmental interests • discuss potential core faculty, researchers and affiliates • evaluate the institutional options to locate such a program • consider funding support and industrial sponsorship • draw up plans for a Summer Institute in Design and Computation and to finalize • a draft report to the Vice Chancellor, Academic Affairs, establishing a new initiative in Design and Computation at UCLA
LOCATION AND TIME OF SYMPOSIUM The Symposium will be held at the Mandalay Beach Resort, 2101 Mandalay Beach Road. Oxnard, CA 93035, Telephone 805 984 2500. Participants will meet on the evening of Thursday May 22 for dinner. The symposium will last for two days, from Friday thru UCLA SYMPOSIUM ON DESIGN AND COMPUTATION A WHITE PAPER 57 ______Saturday afternoon.
Invited participants will receive a READER which will include the following papers, chapters and reviews upon which the Symposium prospectus above has been based. This will be mailed with details of ground transportation arrangements in April.
References: Carterette E ‘Review of George Stiny Pictorial and Formal Aspects of Shape and Shape Grammars Birkhauser Verlag, Basel and Stuttgart 1975' in Computers and the Humanities 1977 11 168-172 Earl C F ‘Creating design worlds’ Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design 1986 13 177-188 Earl C F The representation of kinematic chains’ Environment and Planning B l979 6 455-468 Earl C F. Johnson J H ‘Graph theory and analysis’ Environment and Planning B 1981 8 367-391 Earl C F. March L ‘Architectural applications of graph theory in R J Wilson, L W Beineke (eds.)Applications of Graph Theory Academic Press 1979, 327-355 Gips I, Stiny C ‘Production systems and grammars: a uniform characterization‘ Environment and Planning B 1980 7 399–408 Harrah D ‘Review of George Stiny and James Gips Algorithmic Aesthetics: Computer Models for Criticism and Design in the Arts University of California Press, Berkeley 1978' in Environment and Planning B 1979 6 471-472 Knight T ‘Shape grammars and color grammars in design’ Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design 1994 21 705-735 Knight T ‘Languages and transformations: a new approach’ in Transformations in Design: a Formal Approach to Stylistic Change and Innovation in the Visual Arts Cambridge University Press 1994 Krishnamurti R. Earl C F ‘Shape recognition in three dimensions’ Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design 1992 19 585-603 March L ‘Babbage’s miraculous computation revisited’ Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design 1996 23 369-376
March L ‘The smallest interesting world’ Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design 1996 23 133-142 March L, Stiny G ‘Spatial systems in architecture and design: some history and logic’ Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design 1985 12 31-53 Stiny G. ‘What is a design?’ Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design 1990 17 97-103 Stiny G ‘A note on the description of designs’ Environment and Planning 1981 8 257-267 Stiny G ‘Boolean algebras for shapes and individuals’ Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design 1993 20 359-362 UCLA SYMPOSIUM ON DESIGN AND COMPUTATION A WHITE PAPER 58 ______Stiny G ‘Formal devices for design’ in Sandra L Newsome, W R Spillers, Susan Finger (eds.) Design Theory ‘88 Springer- Verlag, New York 1988 Stiny G ‘Shape rules. closure, continuity, and emergence’ Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design 1994 21 s49-s78 Stiny G ‘Spatial relations and grammars’ Environment and Planning B 1982 9 113-114 Stiny G ‘The algebras of design’ Research in Engineering Design 1991 2 171-181 Stiny G ‘Weights’ Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design 1992 19 413-430 Stiny G. March L ‘Design machines’ Environment and Planning B 1981 8 245-255
INVITED EXTERNAL PARTICIPANTS Erik Antonsson, Cal Tech [email protected] Professor of Mechanical Engineering; Director, Engineering Design Research Laboratory Organizer NSF Sponsored Workshop on Structured Design Methods for MEMS, 1996
Michael Batty, University College London, UK [email protected] Professor of Spatial Analysis and Planning and Director, Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis. Associate Director, National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis, 1990-95. Journal Editor Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design
Christopher Chippendale, Cambridge University, UK [email protected] Senior Curator, Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology Journal Editor Antiquity
Mark Cutowsky, Stanford University [email protected] Charles M. Piggott Professor, Associate Chair for Design and Manufacturing, Design Division, Department of Mechanical Engineering
Clive Dym, Harvey Mudd, Claremont College [email protected] Fletcher Jones Professor of Engineering Design, Director, Engineering Design Center, Department of Engineering. Founding Editor Artificial Intelligence for Engineering Design, Analysis and Manufacturing
Christopher Earl, Newcastle-on-Tyne, UK C.F. [email protected] Lecturer in Design and Manufacture, Department of Mechanical, Materials and Manufacturing Engineering
Chuck Eastman (UCLA leave of absence), GeorgiaTech [email protected] Professor, Doctoral Program, College of Architecture
Susan Finger, Carnegie Mellon University [email protected] edu Adjunct Associate Professor, Robotics Institute NSF Program Director, Design Theory and Methodology, 1986 Organizer NSF Grantee Workshop on Design Theory and UCLA SYMPOSIUM ON DESIGN AND COMPUTATION A WHITE PAPER 59 ______Methodology, 1988. Journal Editor, Research in Engineering Design: Theory, Applications, and Concurrent Engineering
Ulrich Flemming, Carnegie Mellon University [email protected] Professor, Architecture, and Engineering Design Research Center
James Gips, Boston College [email protected] Professor, Department of Computer Science, Carroll School of Management
Russell Kirsch, Emeritus, National Institute of Science and Technology [email protected]
Terry Knight, MIT [email protected] Associate Professor (latterly UCLA), Institute for Advanced Visual Studies Theme Issue Editor Planning and Design: Design and Computation, the Los Angeles School, 1972- 1997
Ramesh Krishnamurti, Carnegie-Mellon [email protected] Professor, Director of CADLAB, Department of Architecture
Alan de Pennington, OBE, Leeds University, UK [email protected] Professor of Computer Aided Engineering, Department of Mechanical Engineering. Director, The Keyworth Institute of Manufacturing and Information Systems Engineering. NSF Program Director for Computer Integrated Engineering (1986)
George Stiny, MIT [email protected] Professor (latterly UCLA), Design Theory, Department of Architecture
William Spillers, New Jersey Institute of Technology [email protected] Distinguished Professor, Chair, Civil and Environmental Engineering Organizer of NSF Symposium on Basic Questions of Design Theory, 1974 NSF Grantee Workshop on Design Theory and Methodology, 1988
INVITED UC PARTICIPANTS Alice Agogino, Engineering, UCB, Associate Dean Ed Carterette, Psychology UCLA, Emeritus Helen Couclelis, Geography UCSB, Associate Director NCGIA David Harrah, Philosophy UCR, Emeritus Michael Jura, Physics, UCLA David Levine, Economics, UCLA Robin Liggett, Architecture and Urban Design/ Urban Planning, UCLA Ajit Mal, MANE, UCLA Richard Nelson, Civil and Environmental Engineering, UCLA Stott Parker, Computer Science, UCLA Dwight Read, Anthropology, UCLA UCLA SYMPOSIUM ON DESIGN AND COMPUTATION A WHITE PAPER 60 ______Paul Schachter, Linguistics, Emeritus, UCLA UCLA SYMPOSIUM ON DESIGN AND COMPUTATION A WHITE PAPER 61 ______ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The conveners of the Symposium thank all those who have so actively participated. Special thanks are due to Gloria Goldberg and Susan Townsley (Symposium Staff Co-ordinator) in the Vice-Chancellor for Academic Affairs Office for making appointments and arrangements so graciously and expeditiously. Most of all we are indebted to the Vice-Chancellor for Academic Affairs, Claudia Mitchell-Kernan, whose scholarly foresight and sense of intellectual adventure has made this event possible. We hope that all our collective efforts will live up to her high, academic ambitions, and indeed lead to the establishment of a new interdepartmental research and doctoral program in Design and Computation Studies at UCLA.
CONVENERS Lionel March, SOAA, UCLA, Mark Tapia, Design Department, Symposium Chair Symposium Secretary [email protected] [email protected]
Appendix V: 1993 Proposal for a Center for Design and Computation
A Center for Design and Computation was proposed first in 1993 in a draft statement by Professor Charles M Eastman, now of the Colleges of Architecture and Computing , Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta GA. The proposal was included in the document Design for a New School: School of Arts and Architecture (pp11, 39). The section entitled PURPOSE is reproduced below.
The Center for Design and Computation is proposed as a new interdisciplinary center at UCLA that focuses on research and teaching in new interdisciplinary areas of design. The center is based on the premise that there are rich opportunities for reformulating design beyond a craft and intuitive undertaking to include scientific principles. It also aspires to reformulate engineering beyond issues of analysis to include formal methods of integration and synthesis. The benefits of integrating design as both an art and a science would be significant for many industries in the US and the region, with special emphasis on manufacturing and construction.
Such integration involves two parallel activities: UCLA SYMPOSIUM ON DESIGN AND COMPUTATION A WHITE PAPER 62 ______(1) development of the theory, tools and techniques for new forms of synthesis and for realizing the integration of design. Formal and practical developments in these areas are just beginning to bear fruit in the development of new theories and methods of synthesis, new tools such as integrated data bases and modeling techniques, new forms of evaluation, such as simulation tools and expert systems, and new tools and methods for preserving information, of both scientific and cultural nature;
(2) development of new formats of education that produce people capable of creatively utilizing this new technology and of realizing these forms of integration. Ultimately, these people will be able to design and produce higher valued products.
The development of the center will begin by focussing on the first activity, building up the second over time.
Most of the current research in design is going on at private universities on the East coast, such as Carnegie-Mellon, MIT and Rensellaer Polytechnic Institute. There is no equivalent presence in the western US. The current work at these other locations focuses on the design of products based solely on the better integration of their function. The unique opportunity for UCLA to develop a synthesis of the art and science that is broadened to include issues of style and aesthetics, which has not been addressed by the other centers. This is consistent with the strengths of UCLA and the southern California region, where product design and applied art commingle with aerospace and automobile design centers. Strong activities in this area at UCLA would create a new area of strength that is supportive of industries in California, Especially manufacturing, construction and entertainment.