#longform ### **5 Questions for thinking about software in design.** ## 2019 Point 1: the **[[Default]]**. There are no non-technical forms of creativity, all creativity is bound to a technical datum. The possibility space is given by the material or the medium. Cartesian and oculocentric logic permeates architectural [[design]] since Alberti. All design software perpetuates the dominant logic of something we can call the Universal space of modernity. Dominating the 2d plane, plans sections, formalism etc. The software default continues this story. What you can do is given by what is in the apparatus. Engineering mind, the image of the default as the image of the Cartesian [[Mind]]. Show classical interfaces, grids etc. Point 2: **[[Simulation]]**, Worlding and Modeling. What are our models in this new regime, and what does it mean to [[Model]]? Extending the modeling with physics, forces and motion. A technical regime of production that overcomes Cartesian logic (Greg Lynn's Animate Form is an early text describing this shift). Introduction of real time simulation tools and real time rendering, collapsing the production, post production and [[Play]] into one continuum. Show Unreal for film production. Show Platform sandbox. Point 3: The **Interactive image**, the post-cinematic image. The most technically and culturally evolved type of images in history - interactive diagrams of power. Image as a relation of power. Interactive images are to host and collapse all previous regimes and genres of representation. Games are an important subset of interactive images, and they probably represent the most evolved subset of the type. Indicate a shift from a subject to user or player, introducing a new take on Duchamp‘s idea of the completion of a work of art by the audience. The shift from subject to user/player. Ar and vr as sub models. Show: Tetris Effect, Nier:Automata, Supersurface. Point 4: **[[Content]]** (the internet as raw material, but also as the context where work is deployed). The [[First Principles]] : Where architecture comes from, from mathematical primitives to abstraction to objects and images to content. The big flat now, the radical acceptance, Warhol’s I like everything as the model. The Internet as a model, from utopia to the landfill; the collapse into images as non referential signs. Anything can become anything. Show bots, [[Become The Internet]] Point 5: **AI** and the new forms of intelligence and creativity The coming ai and novel modes of architectural thinking that we need to invent. This will not just simply happen, we need to actively construct it. In order to begin, we might need to kill our idols and forget about stuff that we know, and this especially goes for the mode of architectural thinking that was informed by the Cartesian perpectivalist and oculocentric worldview and its descendants, including orthography, formalism and close reading. I here especially refer to two (weirdly) intertwined traditions in architectural criticism, that of formalism on the one hand and that of all kinds of literary techniques applied to design (close reading, semiotic analysis etc) on the other. We also might need to go away from immediate visual fascination with this material and start asking operative questions, questions about use etc. It seems that new techniques of understanding and interpretation would rely on inference, visual analogy, making of correlations - would basically look at ai models and how they structure relations between different domains. The idea of latent [[Space]] as a conceptual counterpoint to design space.