Some portion of the subject matter of this book—perhaps all of it—may be unfamiliar to you, or you may be an experienced graphic or industrial designer, an experienced coder, or a student of architecture, but just beginning to grapple with some of the questions raised here. In any case, there are some general understandings of design, the built environment, and computing systems, and concepts that are needed to establish a foundation for further inquiry. The first part of the book presents the most important of these. If they cover familiar ground, they might be skipped or skimmed.
Models. Humans build many different kinds of models, including scale models of buildings, conceptual models of natural systems, and digital models of real-world phenomena that are fundamental to applying the power of computers to solving problems. An examination of some of the characteristics of models is critical to beginning to build a model of design computing.
The Built Environment. Design operates across a great many scales, from graphic design and product design up to buildings, civic infrastructure, and regional planning. Distinct from the natural world, the built world involves human intention and action. The disciplines of urban planning, urban design, landscape architecture, and architecture share many concepts and challenges, as well as many tools. This chapter presents the broad challenges and opportunities of architecture and design as seen through the prism of computing.
Computers. While often presented in anthropomorphic terms, computers are fundamentally complex machines that thrive on predictability. To really understand design computing, we need to become familiar with some of these fundamentals. We need to learn to “think inside the box.”
Monkey See, Monkey Do. Application of computer technology requires understanding of both the technology and the application domain. Often, with new technologies, the first phase of application is to mimic pre-existing patterns. We examine the state-of-the-art with regard to computing tools and design, most of which is based on attempting to recreate in digital form the processes, tools, and representations that existed in the pre-digital, or analog, world. In this we observe the result of approaching design computing by “doing what designers do.”