Yahoo Pipes Working Well

After some Googling, I managed to find an example to get some Yahoo Pipes stuff working. Pretty nifty. In a few minutes, you'll see it in the background, below the canvas element. It's a simple graphical way of reading the mind of the city of Sydney, by finding prominent images describing its life. It's a quick and easy design informant for the kinds of activity Sydney's popularity and publicity thrives on, and can serve as a basis for the kinds of events, activities, and ways of life a new built organism on the F.A.M.E. site would do better to nurture and grow with.

A technical note: the Pipe is currently working in Firefox and Google Chrome (on Windows 7), though IE is another question because it's majorly lagging behind the other browsers when it comes to... anything usefully or interestingly complex, really. IE compatability isn't an important part of the Yahoo Pipes experiment, anyway. All that matters is that I can retrieve interesting and useful information, then - because this is a design subject - process it into aesthetically pleasing information.

Letting Grasshopper Experimentation Evolve with Galapagos

I'm currently fiddling with something I'd been sitting on since late last week, not sure if it would work or not. A city generator in Grasshopper. I'm using it to test my knowledge of how a city forms over time. It's an ongoing experiment, since a city is a very complex system of cityblock-level and building-level evolution, and relies on many factors as outlined in my previous posts.

For a while, I was a little stuck on iterating over arrays stored oddly in a tree, but with a post on the Grasshopper forums and a prompt reply from David Rutten (the creator of Grasshopper O_o), the solution is working much more convincingly.

Rather than manually trawling through all possible variations of the parameters controlling my city form generator, I decided to let Grasshopper's Galapagos solver do its thing. The cool part of it is that once I made it, I could just sit back and watch Galapagos find a city form optimised for the survival functions I define.

Also, while on the Grasshopper website, I found a cool video that really inspires me to do more with Galapagos:

Project Teaser from Nate Holland on Vimeo.

New Background Looking Pretty Darn Good

Russell asked me to restyle my background to make the fine evolutionary structures and processes going on behind the scenes more evident. Since I "spaghetti coded" the final touches to it, I figured it'd be better to start from square one again, this time with a clearer goal in mind.

Currently, I've gone through 20 subversions of the new background, carefully working on a new aesthetic. This time, instead of basic blocks, the background is comprised of living, growing garden beds.

Each garden bed is made up of:

• One tree that grows and nourishes the garden. If the tree dies, the garden bed's other plants can't receive nourishment to grow.
• Several flowers that grow only if the garden bed's tree is alive. All flowers of a given garden bed are the same colour (the colours used were picked to match the colour scheme of my blog).
• Grass, which grows only while the garden bed's tree is alive. As the tree's main trunk grows in size, the grass spreads.

I'm now quickly working on two things:

• Replication and variation through successful garden beds (ones that've lived long enough) spreading their seeds to create new garden beds beside them. Seeds will spread randomly in four directions: up, down, left, and right, and will vary slightly in their attributes from the parent.
• Feeding trees to keep them alive by hovering the mouse over their garden bed.

An interesting aspect of this experiment is that it can be thought of as an analogy for the evolution of city blocks. The mapping would be:

• Garden beds to city blocks,
• Trees to activity nodes,
• Grass to the parasitic exposure smaller buildings receive from the presence of a successful activity node, and
• Energy to the "life & longevity" a city block's buildings gain from the keen inhabitance of people.

Genes, Memes, and Bemes

After talking with Russell, he suggested that I succinctly define what I mean when I say "gene", "meme", and "beme", since I haven't yet clarified those terms in my posts so far.



Quick Definitions of Gene, Meme, and Beme

A gene is a unit of heredity (things copied from parent to child) in evolution. Though popularly associated with only biological evolution, genes exist in any system involving evolution. The vast majority of the time, genes directly affect the capacity for an organism to survive and its capacity to replicate its genes (eg, having children). More information can be found on the relevant Wikipedia article.

A meme is a gene in the specific context of cultural evolution, where the organisms are cultural trends that compete and cooperate. The term was first coined by Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene as an analogy for how genes work, but soon took off as a useful concept in cultural development.

Here's a video of a TEDTalk by Susan Blackmore that lucidly describes the basics of memes, amongst other interesting hypotheses and observations about them.

A beme is a meme in the even more specific context of the evolution of culture and fashion in building design. This term was coined by me for this research studio to aid in succinctly understanding and describing relevant aspects of my design methodology for the coming final semester. At its base, it is a class of meme, which itself is an abstracted class of gene. When I talk about evolution involving bemes, I will refer to it as bemetic evolution.



Evidence Supporting the Validity of the Concept of a Beme

In a way, the reasoning laid out below served as a loose, conceptual experiment to test the hypothesis that "bemes exist and apply to the evolution of building design". The crux of the evidence for bemes is proving evolution can be applied to the culture and process of building design. As such, a specific definition is required to determine when a system does and does not involve evolution.

According to part of the Wikipedia article mentioned above, in Dan Dennett's book "Consciousness Explained" (1991, Boston: Little, Brown and Co.), evolution exists when a system encapsulates three conditions:

• variation, or the introduction of new change to existing elements,
• heredity or replication, or the capacity to create copies of elements
• differential "fitness", or the opportunity for one element to be more or less suited to the environment than another.

So now it must be proven whether or not the culture of building design involves variation, heredity (or replication), and differential fitness. If any one condition is missing, by definition, the system doesn't involve evolution.

Looking into the history of building design culture, bemetic evolution has manifested as the use of precedent inspiration (replication and heredity), the reinterpretation and appropriation of precedent (variation), and the success and popularity of a design (differential fitness through cultural selection).

And thus, "bemes exist and apply to the evolution of building design" has been qualitatively confirmed through philosophical argumentation.

Re:Design Matrix ReDesign Matrix

Confusing post title, but this post is essentially documentation of some brainstorming for how my Design Matrix is best structured. The original idea I had could be integrated, but this one seems much more sound and able to be translated into actual experiments, rather than the frankly woolly ideas I was working with before (shown in an interactive 3D environment in this post).

Now that I've settled on a title of my graduation project (evolvedDesignInformant), I'll be uploading my work, progress, and thoughts to this blog. Also, the idea of evolution is now established as perhaps the strongest influence on the work I'll be doing. It's a philosophically and mathematically challenging set of ideas to get my head around, but I think I'll get a lot out of it with enough focus. Anyway, on to the design matrix...



EVOLUTION

• Physical buildings, "bemes"
• Metaphysical society, memes
• Virtual design informants

PROGRAMMING

• Physical interpretation and adaptation to physical stimulae through arduino
• Metaphysical programmatic encapsulation of emotions and personality in the parts of a place that give it "life" in a sense -> involve yahoo pipes?
• Virtual modelling of evolution, expanding generic and specific knowledge base [GENEric, SPECIfic -> concepts of evolution can be applied here, too]

MODELLING

• Physical laser cutting, 3d printing, manual modelling, "genetic recombination" of these methods to produce new mutations
• Metaphysical programmatic encapsulation of emotions and personality in the parts of a place that give it "life" in a sense -> involve yahoo pipes?
• Virtual grasshopper [deterministic, evolution], interactive 3D environments

Experimenting with Rhinoceros Grasshopper Video 2 Uploaded

I decided to squeeze in a little more "fiddling time" in transit to and from uni yesterday. One of the first things I said I wanted to know how to make in Grasshopper was a smooth, undulating surface. Thus, the aim of this model was to make an undulating surface, with a few extra things thrown into the mix to expand the amount of things I'd need to figure out to get a finished model. If I recall correctly, the time taken for this model was about 90 minutes.

There weren't many hiccups through this video, since I'm getting more used to knowing where to look for the kinds of functions I want. The main sticking point this time was when I tried to give the undulating 2D surface thickness. My initial thought was to duplicate the surface upwards with a "move", and then try the "cap holes" function. However, that didn't work since "cap holes" only works for holes defined by planar curves, rather than intelligently joining vertices with edges, and the resulting closed polygons with surfaces like I'd hoped. I ended up realising an "extrude" was all I needed.

After that, the only confusing thing was figuring out how the solid functions work. At first, I couldn't figure out why two cylinders would no longer work for a solid union when I was trying to intersect them, but then I noticed that Grasshopper's cylinder primitive isn't a closed solid, so trying to perform a solid union for them when their open ends weren't exactly planar would end up failing. After using cap holes, that problem was fixed.

Another thing: I just took a look at PK's blog and saw he'd posted a video using Grasshopper's "Galapagos" capsule. I remember Russell mentioning it in a previous studio class, but I'd forgotten to check it out. Looking at some videos and fiddling briefly with it in Grasshopper to evolve solutions to various simple equations, it seems to be exactly the sort of thing I'd be interested in using to evolve different aspects of my final design!

I'll definitely be using it to see what I can do with it.

Experimenting with Rhinoceros Grasshopper Video Uploaded

The video finished rendering and uploading, so here it is!