Michal Piasecki recently recently developed a generative process for Malgorzata Mozolewska‘s “Structural Ornament”, a project aiming at embedding algorithmic aesthetics into structural logic. The outcome turned out to be more of a material than an object. The project is Malgorzata’s master thesis at the Faculty of Design, Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw.

Below is an excerpt from Malgorzata’s description:

“Structural ornament arises on the verge of order and chaos, mathematic calculation and chance, but once achieved, it may serve to shape any object you like. It is generated by a purpose-made software that takes into account the shape of a desired object, loads and pressures therein and adds a component of chance so that the structure obtained, while functional, is different each and every time and not entirely foreseeable. Preparation of the software was preceded by painstaking analysis of the history and transformation of ornament over time, helping to precisely channel my search and to find my own way of creating the structural ornament which is firmly rooted in history, inspired by processes seen in nature, but created using modern technologies.”

Michal’s role was the development of the software. It has an arbitrary shaped mesh as an input. The user is then able to assign the forces. The software then conducts a series of steps to generate a 3d printable infill responsive to the forces present. First is a structural analysis using a direct stiffness method. An outcome of this is a 3-dimensional array of voxels, each containing data on the forces and displacement. This data is used to generate a grid of points which becomes denser where forces are greater. Then the infill is generated based on this grid, thus it becomes responsive to the forces present.

Michal Piasecki’s recent design – Weaving Bowl – was selected for the final of Young Design 2010 competition organized by Warsaw’s Institute of Industrial Design (IWP). During the project presentation at IWP, taking place on June 2nd this year, Michal emphasized how mass customization paradigm shifts designers and users roles. Designers’ focus moves away from a single solution towards a spectrum of possible forms, while the “users”, “customers”, “prosumers” or “co-designers” choose a single option from this spectrum.

Michal later moved on to describe the spectrum of Weaving Bowl’s forms, also often called the solution space. The product is controlled by three attributes: height, porosity and type of material. The size of the object is 20 by 20 by 4-16 cm and it is a 3d printed piece. It is designed to be manufactured using stereolithography, fused deposition modeling or selective laser sintering.

Parameter 1: height.

Parameter 2: porosity.

Parameter 3: type of material.

Different algorithms for browsing through a solution space of such product where also discussed. This part of the presentation was directly related to Michal’s PhD research, where he is looking at two distinctive approaches to the design of configurators:

- An elective approach where users define levels of each of the product attributes explicitly.

- An instructive approach – an implementation of genetic algorithms which enables users to manually select parents of next generations without a need to understand how many parameters control the product and what each of them is responsible for exactly.

These two approaches were compared in the Breeding Objects Experiment 1.

Michal Piasecki recently took part in a symposium of PhD students researching computational design. Hosted by Centre for Information Technology and Architecture (CITA) in Copenhagen, the event drew together PhD students and tutors from The Bartlett, UCL, Spatial Information Architecture (SIAL) at RMIT and CITA.

The event was structured into 4 panels and presentations of PhD research where followed by an open discussion moderated by panel leaders. The list of all speakers is below:

June 11th: Panel 1: “Materials & Responses”. Moderators: Sean Hanna and Ole Sigmund.

Norbert Palz: “ Emerging Architectural Potentials of a Tuneable Materiality through Additive Fabrication Technologies”.

Sarat Babu: “Microkinetics”.

Aurelie Mosse: “Self-Actuated Textiles in the Design of Domestic Spaces”.

Gennaro Senatore: “Responsive Adaptive Building Structures”.

June 11th: Panel 2: “Adaptation”. Moderators: Jane Burry and Alasdair Turner.

Ruairi Glynn:  “An approach to interactive architecture”.

Christopher Leung: “Passive autonomic computing with heat motors and their compounds”.

Michal Piasecki: “An evolutionary approach to online mass customization of products”.

Abel Maciel:  “Negotiations of instrumental values  in architectural design: seeking for concept formation structures”.

June 14th: Panel 3: “Digital Methods”. Moderators: Martin Tamke & Alasdair Turner.

Anders Hermund: “ Applied 3D modeling and Parametric Design”.

Daniel Davis:  “Declarative Schemata: challenging the inflexibility of the flexible digital model”.

Alexander Pena de Leon:  “Intuition Based Parametric Strategies for Solving Complex Architectural Problems”.

Tore Bank: “Parametri I Praksis: Generative Performance in Architecture”.

Brady Peters: “Computing Sound Performance”.

June 14th: Panel 4: “Scripted Architectures”. Moderators: Mark Burry and Mette Ramsgaard Thomsen.

Tim Ireland: “Form follows function: activity defines function, gesticulates space”.

Jacob Riiber: “Self-organization as design methodology”.

Kindal_Al Sayed: “Spatial Morphogenesis: an analytical and generative design approach towards modeling and simulating the dynamics of spatial change in cities”.

Critical Practice, a cluster of artists, researchers and academics hosted by Chelsea College of Art and Design has recently commissioned Ola Wasilkowska and Michal Piasecki to design a temporary spatial intervention for their Parade event. The event took place on 21-23 May, 2010 at Rootstein Hopkins Parade Ground in London.

The structure, called Assemblage in Public compromises computational design strategies with a low-tech assembly of repeatable components on site. The project is rooted in an idea that a repetition of a few simple rules is able to construct complex geometry, which can host different functions.

The core structure of the intervention was obtained through multi objective optimization with genetic algorithms. The optimization was conducted with a purpose built software written in Processing. The goal was to distribute the components according to a predefined “shadow map” and to keep them structurally stable at the same time. 4320 crates where used in total. Below are some of the individuals from one of the middle generations.

After the core was erected according to the plans extracted from the optimized form, everyone was invited to contribute to the intervention by adding on furniture. These where meant to be integrated and dissolved in the structure, so that discovering them may be surprising, but at the same time when they start to be used, they always prove comfortable. For this part of components assembly, there was no pre-defined layouts, so the structure started to crawl in diverse directions.

The low-tech crate component enabled the mixture of an evolutionary search for an optimal form with collective intelligence to create an attractor intervening the everyday use of the public.

Images: courtesy of Marsha Bradfield and Neil Cummings from Critical Practice.

The first iteration of the Excel spreadsheet script will generate instances of parametric definitions which will be random but constrained by maximum and minimum values of each of the attributes. Further iterations will feature a variety of browsing algorithms. For now have a look at how it works with Solidworks:

Joris Laarman Studio commissioned Michal Piasecki to develop a generative process for their Starlings Table project. The 3d printed piece of furniture was  on show at Friedman Benda gallery in New York between March 4 and April 10, 2010.

The process consisted of a 3d flocking simulation based on the Reynold’s boids algorithm. User of the software could freeze the flock at any given moment. If the spatial arrangement of the boids was satisfactory, they could initiate the latter part of the process, which took the arrangement data to generate an stl file valid for 3d printing. The table was manufactured by Materialise, using stereolithography and nickel plated.

Green2 is a new polish architecture and design magazine focused on sustainability. Their second issue is on biomimetic design and Michal Piasecki was asked to write an article on computational means of introducing biomimetics into the design process.

The article begins with the discussion of Andrew Kudless’ P-Wall project. An inquiry which seems to be deeply rooted in Frei Otto’s research on material computation. Michal further argus that biomimetics is about mimicking natural processes of formation, rather then natural forms themselves and that simulation of evolution and the process of learning falls into this category as well. The discussion of evolutionary algorithms starts with Karl Sims’ early experiments on breeding three-dimensional forms expressing certain types of behaviors.

A discussion follows of William Latham’s and Stephen Todd’s proposal of using evolution not as an optimization tool, but as a tool with which artists and practitioners from other fields could breed potential solutions to the problems they deal with, based on some not explicitly defined criteria. An idea which proved to be a great inspiration for my PhD research topic.

Finally three architecture and design examples are there: Rogers, Stirk, Mabour and Partners collaboration with Expedition Engineering on The canopy in of a metro station in Naples. Sean Hanna’s and dr. Sivash S. Mahdavi’s research into optimization of the “SLS microstructure” and Morphogenetic Experiment 2 by Achim Menges and MiT’s Emergent Design Group:

Breeding Objects Experiment 01 is my first experiment with configurators for mass customization of products over the Internet, conducted as part of PhD research at the Bartlett School of Graduate Studies. The experiment is a comparison of two types of configurators: “parametric” configurators and genetic algorithms configurators. In parametric configurators users have to specify the values of each of the parameters explicitly, while in genetic algorithms configurators they are not required to do so. Thanks to artificial selection, they can instead navigate through solution space by breeding objects, that is manually selecting parents of next generations.

The experiment is only about the patterns of interaction with the tools available, so you will not be asked to fill in any questionnaires. Once you start interaction with the tools, you will be able to navigate between them using links on top of each page.

Warsaw as an Emergent Structure is an initiative to acknowledge that a city is a complex system. It is also a book featuring texts from researchers and theoreticians from various fields, centered around the concept of complexity in urban environment. Ola Wasilkowska, who initiated it, aims at creating a multidisciplinary round table, aiming at developing new means of understanding the city and managing it’s growth.

Ola Wasilkowska commissioned Michal Piasecki to write a prototype of an online platform for planning negotiations. Em_Wwa 1.0 aims to be an amalgam of top-down and bottom-up development. The municipality is able to control global parameters such as the percentage of particular functions on the site and the size of the new developments. Developers can seek places for their initiatives using a cellular automata-like algorithm, which evaluates their propositions accordingly to what has already been generated and to lighting, transportation and accessibility constraints. Citizens can engage in the process by creating their own propositions of developments and commenting those generated by others.

The site used in the EM WWA 1.0 prototype is Plac Defilad – a large square in the heart of Warsaw. The square surrounds a once controversial monument of architecture in favor of ideology – the Palace of Culture. Numerous competitions for a master plan of this square where organized to date, but it remains undeveloped as it gradually morphed from a site into a symbol.

The software was written in Processing.

Evolve rings where commissioned and are distributed by Fluid Forms. I have co-designed them together with Krystian Kwiecinski and they are available for purchase since today. They where designed with an aid of an artificial selection in genetic algorithm (GA). I have developed the phenotype together with Krystian and then wrote a purpose-built GA tool for breeding, rather than designing products in Processing. We will convert the GA tool into a configurator for mass customization of the rings. It should become available on Fluid Forms site early in 2010. Below is an explanation of the roots of evolutionary approach in design, which I wrote for the purpose of the launch.

Roots of the Evolve ring generative design process

Today Darwinian model of evolution by natural selection is widely acknowledged. It assumes that a new generation of individuals within a given specie inherits properties of these individuals from the previous generation, which where the most fit to survive. Fitness to survival is always evaluated within a given environment. It is not objective, but a subject to particular conditions which the individual happened to find itself in.

On a metaphorical level, theorists has refereed to evolution of culture, societies and products that they develop. Philip Steadman’s “The Evolution of Designs” from 1979 is a great roadmap of evolutionary metaphor in reference to any kind of artifacts, including designer objects and architecture. Bashford Dean’s study of historical evolution of helmet design or Lane-Fox’s and Pitt-Rivers’ tracing of evolutionary relationships of Australian weapons are just some of the examples discussed in Steadman’s influential book.

With the dawn of computing, evolution could become an applied tool used for seeking answers to particular problems rather than a conceptual model only. Survival of the fittest has been a source of inspiration for developers of “evolutionary algorithms”, which enable navigation through vast spaces of potential solutions in any imaginable field from marketing to transportation. They also help find solutions which are a best fit for given criteria, even if these are very complex and somewhat contradictory. The art world was quick to adapt the notion of evolution and survival of the fittest, but engineering was as well. In the art world William Latham imagined artists growing artworks rather than creating them already in 1985.

Later his renowned collaboration with IBM’s Stephen Todd led to development of the software called “Mutator”. The software literally enabled Latham to breed his sculptures just like the gardener breeds plants. In this case the individual most fit to survive is the one the artist likes the most. The possibility of breeding jewelry is also mentioned in Latham’s and Todd’s contribution to Evolutionary Design by Computers edited by Peter Bentley.

This is in contrast to application of evolution in engineering, where aesthetics do not have a significant impact on the validity of the solution. What is important in this case is performance. An example is the work of dr Peter Bentley and Stephen Manos on optimization of Holey optical fibres. These fibres are able to transmit light on large distances and their capacities are greatly enhanced by small air holes running through their entire length. Question was what shape, size and number of the wholes provides a fibre with best transmission capacity? Looking for an answer with evolutionary computation likely took millions of solutions to develop, but as the process was automated the time lapse was not so big and the results where rewarding.

Evolve ring brings evolution to the design world, not as a metaphor, but as a design tool. In design, aesthetics plays a crucial role, but the design has to be valid from a manufacturing stand point as well. This is why an algorithm used by Michal Piasecki and Krystian Kwiecinski is an amalgam of the GA from the art world and from the engineering world. Michal and Krystian developed a parametric phenotype first. Later Michal unleashed the process of evolution of jewelry and guided it towards the designs, which became the Evolve rings designer’s series from Fluid Forms. These pieces are breed, not designed.