Exactly a year ago I wrote a post about HTML5 & WebGL. At the time WebGL was so new that most of the article was speculation extrapolated from just a couple of tech demos. The intervening year has seen remarkable progress, so much so I thought it would be worthwhile today to revisit the questions raised by last year’s post.
The business of WebGL
Probably the most significant WebGL development in the past year has not been technological but rather financial. Investors have given millions of dollars to a number of companies who are all innovating to become the next major CAD player. This has seen WebGL go from a technology supporting a number of cool tech demos to a technology supporting a number of new businesses. Within these businesses a number of conceptions of WebGL have emerged, each with their own challenges:
Motorbike design in 3dtin
1. WebGL and 3d printing
A number of the new companies are focused on linking 3d printing with web based 3d modellers (examples include Tinker Cad and 3d Tin). The premise is an extreme version of mass customisation where people design the particular 3d object they want and then send it to a company like Shapeways to build – and in the process TinkerCad and 3dTin pocket some of the printing fee as profit.
I see the logic but I personally think this is a business model looking for a problem. The first hindrance is that consumers have no idea what they desire (“faster horses” according to Henry Ford). The second hindrance is that even if they know what they want, no one has the time to mess around designing the perfect egg cup. While the process has some value in its novelty, I think the real value will come from selling objects designed by others through these services. They will hit the gold mine if they can spark a designer of Nervous System caliber, although it is hard to see the benefit for a designer of that caliber.
Stair on Autodesk 360
2. WebGL and incumbents
Last year I received an email from Gehry Technologies after I wrote what I thought was a sufficiently vague reference to their secret upcoming product: ”and I have it on good authority that at least one major CAD manufacturer is making a ‘dropbox for CAD files and project data.’” I was referring to GTx, which is now in private beta at https://www.gtxsync.com/. While GTx is not WebGL based (I think it might be Java based) it is still 3d delivered over the web – and for you this year “I have it on good authority” they are ‘looking into’ WebGL 
Autodesk have released a similar product, Autodesk 360. With WebGL, Autodesk lets you share and view folders full of drawings, as well as use Autodesk 360 cloud services (like rendering and structural analysis).
These incumbent CAD companies are in a tricky position – they are trying to compete without competing with themselves. This is why we are seeing GT and Autodesk releasing products that augment their existing desktop software without risking cannibalising any of their existing (and profitable) desktop offerings. So far these ‘dropbox’ like offerings look pretty good but time will tell if fear of cannibalisation will see them missing out on a much larger trend.
Generating cubes with threenode.js
3. WebGL and modelling
The trend the incumbent companies are reluctant to embrace is modelling with WebGL. Clearly Tinker Cad and 3d Tin are each experimenting with solid modelling, but there is also the experimental Grasshopper-like visual programming environment threenodes.js, and the parametric Nurbs based Shape Smith, and the live programming environment SketchPatch, and the model viewer Sunglass.io. So it seems the questions I posed last year have already been answered with a YES:
Will you be able to view associated model data? Will you be able to modify a model? Will you be able to generate a model?
One final question remains to be answered: “will the browser become your preferred way of designing?” At the moment there is still no compelling reason to use the browser if you have the desktop, however this is starting to change. At SmartGeometry2012, Sunglass.io demoed their new API by showing how a model in the browser could be sent to the sunglass.io server to be rendered or have CFD analysis done. They ran the demo from a Macbook Air, a feat possible since the server rather than Macbook Air did the calculations. While I still prefer to do analysis and rendering on my desktop, I think applications like this hint at the killer features WebGL modelling environments may offer to make me reconsider my desktop love.
Getting started
If you want to create your own WebGL modeller it is surprisingly easy to get started. So simple I even had a go (see video above). Over the past year coding WebGL has become much easier thanks to the three.js library. Most of the applications I have referred to above are using three.js, which is fast becoming the jQuery of WebGL. If you know a little bit of Javascript and little bit about HTML, three.js will seem familiar and greatly ease drawing 3d objects in the browser. If you want to try programming WebGL there are a couple of three.js tutorials (1, 2) but I have found the easiest way is just to take some of the examples and mess around with them until they make sense – and with the speed things are developing in the WebGL space, I might just be writing about you next year.
I started this blog in November 2009. Initially very few people knew, and for many months only 10 people a day would come visit. Then on April 3rd, 2010, a man in Italy posted a link on Twitter that said: “Digital Morphogenesis – Easter eggs”. Overnight hundreds of people had followed the link, and they in turn made more connections, weaving this once isolated blog into the much larger ‘network’.
That first connection had a pretty profound impact on me. For one thing I now know the man in Italy is Andrea Graziano. He is a supernode in a network of people sharing new information about computational design. Whereas a few years ago I would struggle to find information on computational design in book and journals, now I just have to open my Twitter and Facebook to see this flowing network of new knowledge. It is like my own newspaper – tailored for my very niche niche (perhaps not coincidentally I have given up reading the real newspaper and no longer have a TV). Yet for all that Andrea shares, for all the impact he has on my information diet, I realised I know very little about him. So I asked him some questions. Ordinarily I would cut the interview down to 1000 words but Andrea’s answers are so interesting, so provocatively full of hope, I have kept them all.
The traffic spike from Andrea’s first connection, followed by spikes from subsequent connections
Daniel: This might seem like a silly question, but like many others I only know you from your links, so what were you doing before you became famous on the Internet?
Andrea: OMG, am I famous?? I was, and I am, an architect. I have a small architectural practice near Turin (Italy) dealing with construction drawings for big buildings. My digital networking activity is something that started some years ago with my DigitAG& blog. It’s a passion that I always do for free in my spare time, although actually it takes more and more time … making me now a sort of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde… half my day spent as a standard practicing architect … half my day spent as one of the many web-nodes in the architectural research community and also as a Co-de-iT member. It’s very hard to maintain these two activities but it’s also my attempt to try to join my practice work with computational research, a big challenge – especially in Italy.
Daniel: What motivated you to start sharing on Twitter, Facebook, G+ (ect.) ?
Andrea: Well … I started my Facebook adventure because I wanted to connect all the friends and colleagues from my DigitAG& blog. I was looking for a way to talk and exchange ideas more fluidly, so Facebook was a natural evolution of the blog. Moreover I always used the blog to post links closely related to architectural research … but many of the interesting things that I saw everyday were about other science fields, or art, or nature, etc. So I started to use Facebook as a complementary flow of links. In fact I think that 80% of my complementary flow goes through my social network profiles. Then someone suggested that I use Twitter because it’s used more by the scientific community. So I started using Twitter and lately also Google+.
I think the main reason I continue my sharing activity via social networks is that our work as computational designers makes no sense if, on the other side, people are unable to understand what we are doing. We are designers of processes … not shapes … so only by explaining our methods and our “cultural paradigm” we can give sense to our work and give it value – both economically and conceptually. So my way to help spread the emerging paradigm of complexity is by using the social networks … and after some years of “networking” I can say that it works in some way. A lot of friends have started doing it also, and are posting interesting links everyday. The best feedback is receiving new friend requests and new followers.
Daniel: Do you notice any differences in terms of engagement from your readers on different platforms (eg. G+ vs Facebook) and what is your favorite platform?
Andrea: Yes … surely. The main difference is the mode of friend/follower aggregation. Facebook is a network that grows via friendships … so it grows via friends that are told about me and so on. Twitter is completely different. It works via hashtags … you can find anyone interested in the same thing by typing a hashtag. So the Twitter network grows around specific interests, resulting in a more focused network. Google+ combines the best parts of both, leading me to better know some of my Twitter digi-friends. I find G+ the most interesting platform or maybe, with the experience, I have learned to add and receive the more interesting connections.
I think that my network activity reveals a lot about network behaviors … I post everyday the same links over the three networks (actually 4 including Scoop.it) The different feedback presents an ongoing experiment. There are several aspects of the reader feedback that need to be underlined. Facebook is sometimes a real mess of links …. the flow of messages is a mix of songs, personal stuff, photos and sometimes interesting links … but on the other hand it enables easy replying, with connected links. Another advantage is that it’s the older one … so more people are into this network and maybe it’s the more colloquial … so I still really like it and I use it as my main platform. Another interesting thing is the effectiveness of links based on the time they were posted. There are some hours that are better for sending out news and letting it spread. I know, it can seem odd, but using networks for a long time you start to develop some network senses and attitudes also. Trying to resume … I think that … yes, the three networks let me know different people in different ways but at the end what really matters is that I know very interesting people in each one.
Daniel: Often you end the day by saying ‘goodnight network’ – who are the network?
Andrea: The more I live in this network, and more I think that the comparison of the web to a global brain, it’s totally true. We are each a digital neuron, able to spread digital signals called links, which are pieces of information that joined together give collective ideas and through collective “muscles” and “bodies” become physical words. I have started to read and learn more about brain structure, function, and complexity. In addition to being fascinated, I have found that using similar strategies as the brain, the web reacts as the brain. So maybe this is part of the reason I call us a network … I’m a node that spread more links, and triggers more thoughts and other node reactions. I think that for the young generation it is strategic to understand and learn about network complexity in order to take a position in the world as citizens and workers. Thus at the end of the day, after having spent a lot of hours flowing in this flux of digital stimuli, I really like to quit my connection saying “goodnight network” … it’s a way to say we are part of a great and unique being.
Daniel: About a year ago I saw Helen Castle (editor of AD) give a lecture, she was boasting about how AD was the first to feature Archigram back in the 60′s. I couldn’t help feeling that had Archigram emerged in 2012, AD would be the last place to run the story. And then I see Patrik Schumacher on Facebook essentially bypassing the magazines and blogs by going straight to his audience. How do you see the architectural discussion evolving in the future?
Andrea: The architectural discussion is evolving due to the social networks but especially due to the culture of sharing that social media spreads and promotes. Everyday, more and more architectural research is available for free on the web. Everyone can easily find, share, and promote interesting research. With this knowledge visible, learning is going to be easier for those who have the passion and motivation.
But I think the main difference comes from doing architecture. The big challenge is always to build architecture. Only by doing can we fail and learn from our errors, share our experience with others and contribute to the evolution of the architectural discussion. Sincerely I don’t believe about new “isms”. In the end we are bringing to architecture, with a delay compared to other science fields, the “complexity paradigm”. The world around us is deeply changing and architecture has to face this. We are moving rapidly from a serialized economy to a customized and personalized one. Machines for production are everyday cheaper and accessible. Innovation is moving from big companies to garages. The young generations are introducing novelty and bringing this complexity paradigm to their research and experiments, which is deeply affecting the architectural evolution and discussion. I don’t think social networks are, or will be, the main places for the architectural discussions. They are tools to reach, meet and know very interesting people. A way to have a direct connection with people, readers, followers, and a way to get some direct and interesting feedback. A great online community of researchers, designers, architects is emerging, but its real value is in the potential to trigger connections.
Daniel: And finally, who do you follow?
Andrea: At the start of 2012 I did a blog post [link] wishing to everyone a ‘Good Network’ and I listed all my preferred nodes. I must say that during this last year I have shifted my attention from architectural stuff to a wider range of interests – mostly due to my friends links and posts. In the next few years, architecture – as everything – will be more and more influenced by other disciplines of knowledge. We are moving to nanoscale matter design, printed materials, self-track everything, ubiquitous computing, an era where information will be the foundation of digital and physical matter. Opening our minds to this new world is the best thing we can do … so be wild in your interests, follow your passions.
Thank you to Andrea for taking the time to answer these questions. You can follow Andrea in many places (understandably):
DigitAG& - http://andreagraziano.blogspot.com/
Co-de-iT - http://www.co-de-it.com/
Social networks:
Twitter - http://twitter.com/digitag
Facebook - http://www.facebook.com/arch.a.graziano
Google+ - http://gplus.to/digitag
Twitter wall - http://www.twylah.com/digitag
Scoop.it – http://www.scoop.it/t/digitag-journal
On a surprisingly tranquil street for the middle of Manhattan, inside an unassuming brick townhouse, gathered around a ping-pong table, sit the members of CASE inc. Or at least the members who do not telecommute from other parts of the Americas. William Mitchell tops the pile of books on the table, although the whole scenario would fit inside one of Mitchell’s books. The only signage is a business card taped to the door, which announces you have entered a place more like a start-up than an architectural office. And it is. CASE aren’t just another consultancy rationalizing Maya models, CASE are a new generation of designers, unusual not just for their working arrangements, but because they seek to change how architects practice. They do all the rationalisation stuff, but they also guide firms through technological changes and openly share what they do on a suite of websites (Design Reform, Design by Many, CASE inc, on Twitter, and even a spot on Arch Daily). I visited David and Federico when I was in New York and asked them a few questions. To me the salient part of their answers is how little they talk of technology and how little they fetishise complex geometry, to them the real challenge of computational design is an organisational one – a challenge few people (especially academics) are in a position to observe.
Daniel: What was your main motivation for leaving SHoP and starting CASE?
David:
We all bought into a lot of things that SHoP was talking about, bought in is not necessarily the right word, but we really believed in it. They were out there using the technology to push design and as a small firm they were able to do some really amazing things. A lot of that wasn’t really making its way out into the broader industry. In their case I think it worked because they had great buy-in from the partners, they believed in it, and they gave us the flexibility, but that doesn’t scale. So we saw an opportunity as a consultancy to go out and help the industry to implement a lot of these things.
Daniel: What are the main challenges your clients are facing when trying to implement these digital tools?
David:
A lot of it is people problems. Or people challenges – problems is not the right word. I am sympathetic to it. Often we get hired and the decision has been made, ‘we want to implement Revit’ – lets say – so we are the guys that come in and teach you Revit and help you setup your standards. Some people just don’t want any part of that. They just don’t see the value in it. This is also one of the biggest challenges for clients – conveying why they are doing it. Often times it is a reason like ‘a client said so’, which is not very easy to get buy-in from everyone doing the production on a daily basis. If it was more along the lines of ‘we think this is how we can change the industry, this is how we think we can do twice as much design and get better fees because we are leveraging technology’ then I think people could get onboard with that, but just ‘the client said so’ is kind of meh.
So a lot of it is around people and communication. You can ultimately make technology work, there is always other software. I don’t think cost is a big deal either since the software is switching to these yearly subscriptions, so it doesn’t matter whether they are buying software X or software Y.
Daniel: How do you think practice will change in the next 10 or 20 years?
David:
I think there is two routes. Either fragmentation, where firms get smaller [and hire consultants]. Or vertical integration where a large firm has centres of excellence – a geometry group that services the rest of the firm. I think [vertical integration] is hard to manage because ultimately that group has to answer to somebody and needs some level of accountability. Whereas us as an independent business, our accountability is that if we don’t do it right we are going to go out of business.
Those are the two ways I see it going. And that is not to say they are mutually exclusive but that is what I could see happening.
Daniel: Who are your favorite clients?
David:
I like all our clients, I like all their work, I like all of them, I think they are all equally good. [ Laughs and says not to publish any firm names, 'that will be the first email to come back to me' ]
But they are all different. Some firms have a CIO, some don’t, some have a CTO, some don’t, some have a CKO (Chief Knowledge Officer), some don’t, some are partnerships, some are corporations, some have independent profit centres per office, some don’t. It really is so different per office. And that does translate into how I feel about them as a firm, not in a bad way, but it just gives me sympathy to say ‘I understand they have 10,000 plus people and they just can’t do what a 60 person firm does.’ It is just not apples and oranges. So one thing over time is my appreciation for the complexity being far beyond the geometry. In academic persuits it’s like ‘oh yea that is really cool geometrically’ but that is such a small part of everything that goes into a building. Complex systems, complex contracts, liability structures, delivery structures, schedules, all of that stuff is complex and can benefit from technology. So different firms tackle that stuff in different ways, which are not trivial by any means.
This is the first of (what I hope will become) a series of interviews with computational designers exploring where the industry is going.
The inaugural interviewee is Chin Koi Khoo, a PhD candidate at SIAL who has dreamt up (and is currently building a full scale prototype of) a materially responsive architecture (video below). Suspended on an aluminum tensegrity frame, Khoo gets his architecture to sense, react, and move, by carefully composing material composites to naturally contract in certain weather, or illuminate in low light levels, or to sense the proximity of a human passing by (the sensing skin for this frame is at the end of this post). This all happens without the external mechanical actuators present on other dynamic architecture projects – like the Arab World Institute. In Khoo’s projects, the materials themselves are the actuators. The work is a continuation of Khoo’s work as an architect and as the co-founder of the architectural animation firm Metamosaic.
Daniel: What was your interest in dynamic systems prior to starting this project?
Khoo: Actually my first proposal was about animated surfaces. I though at the time it was quite cool. But when you go through the literature, a lot of people have digitally animated architectural skins. In the animation industry you can do anything. The question becomes how to make it physical and how this impacts the spatially of architecture, impacts real experience, impacts real structure.
Why havn’t we built these types of structures typically?
It is of course because of the technology, the energy, and the cost. Building a dynamic structure is a journey into the unknown. For instance, the budget of my project is $3000. What can $3000 do? Can I create a responsive architecture from $3000? Can you create a lightweight skin, that can respond, that can sense, and that can compute. We don’t know, and in the end this project is just the beginning.
How will architecture change over the next 50 years?
In 50 years time I would say the computational process will be within the material. So you don’t need anything external doing the processing, it is all done in the material itself. The materials won’t just be kinetic, they will be intelligent, sensing and changing to their environment.
What are your main tools?
Mainly Processing, Arduino, Grasshopper, and Firefly.
And then for fabrication, Rhino. The materials are shape memory alloy, silicon rubber with various pigments and additives I mix myself, aluminium, and nichrome wire.
Who else is doing working like this?
Mark Goulthorpe
Cloud 9
Shape shift
More of Khoo’s work can be found on Cumincad.
I am sorry it has been almost two months since my last post. Spending every day writing my PhD has killed all my desire to blog when I get home. And my plan to create blog posts from my PhD (a new-media way of testing the ideas before submission) didn’t work out since extracted chunks of the PhD don’t really make sense without the context of the whole argument. In the future I think I will do a series of interview posts (if you know any interesting subjects get in contact) but for now I would like to share a book I came across whilst writing:
I was pretty excited to find Digital Culture in Architecutre by Antoine Picon (on Amazon
). No one has ever written a full history of digital architecture but this promises to be the book. On first flick through it seems to deliver, pictures of the Hypersuface and early diagrams of the internet, snapshots from Second Life with photos of Stelarc, all in one book. The introduction is exciting too, as much because Picon is an eloquent writer (a rarity for architectural historians).
The book is broken into four sections, starting with a historical overview and followed by three perspectives of contemporary practice: Experiments in Form and Performance; From Tectonic to Ornament; The City in the Digital Sprawl.
The historical overview should have alerted me not all is well with this book. The chapter starts quite happily talking about punch cards and Turing but at the point where Sutherland comes into the story, the chapter instead spends 3 pages talking about city planning in the United States for atomic attacks, never even mentioning Sutherland. And at the point where John Frazer becomes relevant, Cedric Price is instead discussed. Completely missing are Antoni Gaudí, Frei Otto and Heinz Isler. I know one book is never going to be able to include everyone, and Picon explains in his conclusion that “rather than trying to review everything … my ambition has been to map the main issues to the development of digital design.” It still seems inexcusable to write a 44 page historical overview of the main issues in the development of digital design and never mention Sutherland or Gaudí or Otto. Unfortunately this historic overview sets the tone for the rest of the book.
In analysing contemporary digital culture, Picton makes many strange correlations and often leaves out salient facts that would much better explain what he is observing. An example is his section on “The Surface as Architecture” (84-94). Picton begins by saying the focus on surface in digital architecture “is tempting to relate to postmodernist theory and the insights it provides on the changing identify of the human subject.” Thankfully Picton does not give into this temptation and instead discusses surface with reference to superficiality, the complexity of contemporary spatial programs, clothing and fashion, a preference for flows instead of geometry, the binaries of exterior and interior, and the folds of Deleuze’s theory. No where does Picton discuss the manufacturing processes of surfaces, or the economics, or the structural implications.
I agree with Picton’s observation that digital architecture does have an obsession with surface but I disagree with what he cites as the cause. To me it is pretty simple to see why architects often confine digital practice to surface: punching a metal screen into a pattern and hanging it on the facade of a building is many orders of magnitude cheaper than messing with the geometry and structure of the building. These are not enlightened architects reading Deleuze, these are architects reacting to much larger trends in manufacturing and building economics.
These larger trends in digital culture are missed by Picon who is reluctant to examine the digital side of digital culture. This critique could be extended to the rest of Digital Culture in Architecture, where time and time again Picon discusses the superficial cultural outcomes of digital architecture without digging into the technical causes. As a result, Picon draws questionable conclusions about the significant moments in digital design. Nevertheless, Digital Culture in Architecture is still one of the most complete books I have read on the history of digital architecture, although it is by no means the definitive history.
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Left image from http://www.flickr.com/photos/jeanbaptisteparis/3348578947/
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