Actuating (Auto)Poiesis

Abstract

Creativity in the natural and human worlds is distinct. Designers have always looked to nature as a source of inspiration and in recent decades the computer has been used as a tool to engage with the self-organising and emergent properties of natural phenomena. Used to simulate the dynamic behavioural properties of natural systems the computer has been utilised as a means to open up a world of possibilities and to empower designers to create novel productions. However, whilst the computation is a powerful tool in design which has led to a paradigmatic shift in the sorts of artefacts designers create it has not as yet led to a paradigmatic shift in how we think about designing and creativity. This is because novelty is rarely intrinsic to and thus an outcome of the computational process architects and designers engage with in the simulations they use to explore and design. In this paper we consider the capacity to effect novelty in computational (architectural) design. We propose that whilst autopoiesis is an intriguing concept it does not offer a means to effect novelty, because the identity of an autopoietic system is integral to its constitution. Only by breaking a systems identity may we affect novelty when trying to create through self-organising and emergent processes.