The Second Digital Turn: Design Beyond Intelligence

2017 | Science & Mathematics

In the early 1990s the design professions were the first to intuit and interpret the new logic of digital design and fabrication. Digital mass-customization (the use of digital tools to mass-produce variations at no extra cost) has already changed the way we produce and consume almost everything. In this book, Mario Carpo suggests that the same technical logic, now applied to all kinds of immaterial objects and to commerce at large, is heralding a new society without scale, where bigger markets will not make anything cheaper. he early tools for digital design and production spawned a style of smooth and curving lines and surfaces that gave visible form to the first digital age, and marked architectural design for the last twenty years. But today's digitally intelligent architecture no longer looks that way. Carpo explains that this is because the design professions are now coming to terms with a new generation of digital tools they have adopted -- no longer tools for making but tools for thinking. Today's computation is so powerful and cheap that many data-compression technologies that humanity has carefully developed, nurtured, and honed over time may soon be abandoned.

This simple technical truism has vast consequences, as it implies a new kind of science where prediction can be based on sheer information retrieval, and form finding by simulation and optimization can replace deduction from mathematical formulas. Designers have been toying with machine thinking and machine learning for some time now, and the apparently unfathomable complexity of the physical shapes they create that way already expresses a new form of artificial intelligence, outside the tradition of modern science and alien to the organic logic of our minds.

Mario Carpo (Author)