The agency of event event based simulation for architectural design

Abstract

Design increasingly becomes a matter of balancing between the different agencies, boundaries and implications of architectural intentions and material performances. To synthesize these new constellations, complex design systems can be decomposed into flexible and scalable integrations of autonomous, heterogeneous sub-models. When each sub-model has its own goal, the making of design decisions, as well as the registration of their impact, becomes distributed throughout a computational model. This research explores the notion of agency within event-based models. Event-based models decompose continuous systems into components. These components are not designed to work with other components in a traditional sequential mode, or to share a common time-step, but instead communicate asynchronously. This characteristic is particularly well suited to supporting and synthesizing multiple agencies. In this paper we distinguish between three forms of agency: material agency, structural agency, and design agency. We present an event-based modeling approach that supports and synthesizes these types of agency by linking interdependent sub-models. The application of this approach is demonstrated through two case studies: Transmissive Assemblies (Figure 1) and Reflective Growth.