ecological design thinking … digitalism in morphogenetic practices for human centric design thinking

I had the honor to contribute a chapter titled Digitalism in Morphogenetic Practices for Human Centric Design Thinking – Towards a Performative Gestalt through Parametricism to the recently published The Routledge Companion to Ecological Design Thinking: Healful Ecotopian Visions for Architecture and Urbanism. The book, edited by Mitra Kanani, investigates the ways in which designers, architects, and planners address ecology through the built environment by integrating ecological ideas and ecological thinking into discussions of urbanism, society, culture, and design.

The entire text can be found in the book. Please find the abstract below:

Digitalism in Morphogenetic Practices for Human Centric Design Thinking – Towards an ECO Animated Performative Gestalt through Parametricism

Robert R. Neumayr (Vienna), 2022.

Abstract: Responding to the challenges of human-centred design has become an increasingly pressing matter. Urban densification, social stratification, environmental change, and the continuing global pandemic have led to a growing awareness for the need of spaces that offer a robust framework for society’s changing social interaction patterns.
This chapter describes how parametric design practice since its first emergence has expanded, adjusted, and organized its contemporary processes to create empathetic and sustainable environments for human beings by correlating and testing spatial morphologies, quantified social and environmental parameters and material and structural properties, to successfully map out emphatic and performative building solutions.
It analyses how, from its beginnings, Parametricism has evolved its conceptual framework to use its algorithmic strength to effortlessly create large numbers of different complex shapes, which was initially used to playfully expand architecture’s formal repertoire, to focus on the social functionality of the built environment.
It explores and exemplifies in detail how contemporary parametric design techniques, such as genetic algorithms, agent-based social models, parametrized crowd simulations, robotic assembly strategies for parametric models, and the implementation of adaptive social distribution logics have contributed to development of human-centred architectural spaces and concludes with a brief outlook on how Parametricism could be used to contribute to the development of the currently emerging spatial web.

Keywords: Parametricism, Human Centric Parametric Design, Digitalism, Paramtric Social Models.