First international Conference on Critical Digital: What Matter(s)?
Edited by Kostas Terzedis
Harvard University Graduate School of Design, 2008

The purpose of Critical Digital is to foster a dialogue about digital media, digital technology, and design and to challenge the basis of contemporary digital media arguments. The intention is to identify, distinguish, and offer a critique on current trends, tendencies, movements, and practices in digital culture. Critical Digital provides a forum for discussion and enrichment of the experiences in this discourse. Through diverse activities, symposia, competitions, conferences, and publications, Critical Digital is supporting dialogue that challenges what is rapidly becoming the de facto mainstream. What is digital? Why should design be (or not) digital? How have practitioners and schools been using digital media?

The theme of the first conference is What Matter(s)? As the current theoretical discourse in architecture seems to elude digital phenomena, a crucial critical discussion is emerging as a means to address, understand, clarify, and assess the elusive nature of this discourse. Issues related to virtuality, ephemerality, continuity, materiality, or ubiquity, to name a few, while originally invented to explain digital or computational phenomena, are utilized today in the context of a traditionally still material-based design. What is the nature of their use? Is materiality subject to abstract digital concepts? Is the digital buildable? What matters?

As we progress to think and design for the built environment, interactive space, and the body what materializations are actually emerging? What physical manifestations and manifestos are to be promoted? Critical Digital presents and calls for your participation in What Matter(s). Intentionally, the provocation is for both critical writings and projective works which address the issue of the digital within the contemporary design discourse.

Cultural changes based on the fast evolution of digital technologies are continuously developing and affecting all of our activities as professionals, academics, and citizens. Digital culture has affected our notions as inhabitants and creators of a built environment, changing and affecting the way we conceive, transform and produce space.

In the first place, digital design and production processes are simulating and integrating material and environmental conditions, while addressing innovative methods of conception and physical realization of ideas at all scales. This has opened rich areas of research in design and important crosspollinations and multidisciplinary approaches that reinforce and expand the connections between practitioners, industry, and academia. It is a challenge to creativity, rigor, and exploration, but also a product of an increasingly complex understanding of what design is, of what designers can produce, and their relation to the material and physical conditions of the built environment.

It is also fundamental to understand how the development of digitally enhanced products and spaces is affecting our experiences at all scales. New ways of relationships and communications have become quickly available, and imply new models of interaction with the built environment, mediated through digital devices and embedded computation. This also calls for a highly critical and multidisciplinary approach to design, in order to engage the complex phenomena and the fast development of technology without losing sight of what matters - the "substance".

Translations, transformations, transportations of What Matter(s) in design are being called to question. We are looking for positions, projects, and proposals which address the value of the digital in our design cultures. What Matter(s) is an event which invites people interested in bridging or debunking issues of digital material/virtual culture.

What matter(s) in terms of work, process, and thought is to be curated and published and to be debated in an open format at the Graduate School of Design of Harvard University on April 18 and 19 of 2008.

Algorithmic Architecture
Architectural Press/Elsevier, 2006

Why does the word design owe its origin to Latin and not Greek roots? Where do the limits of the human mind lie? How does ambiguity enter the deterministic world of computation? Who was Parmenides and why is his philosophy still puzzling today? This unique volume challenges the reader to tackle all these complex questions and more. Algorithmic Architecture is not a typical theory-based architectural book; it is not a computer programming or language tutorial book either. It contains a series of provocative design projects, and yet it is not just a design or graphic art book per se. Following the tradition of architecture as a conglomeration of various design fields - engineering, theory, art, and recently, computation - the challenge of this book is to present a concept that, like architecture, is a unifying theme for many diverse disciplines. An algorithm is not only a step-by-step problem-solving procedure, a series of lines of computer codes or a mechanistic linguistic expression, but is also an ontological construct with deep philosophical, social, design, and artistic repercussions. Consequently, this book presents many, various and often seemingly disparate points of view that lead to the establishment of one common theme; algorithmic architecture.

Table of Contents

Foreword by Antoine Picon
Prologue
The Strive to Capture the Elusive
The Intricacy of the Otherness
A Brief History of Algotecture
Scripts, Algorithms, and Other Predicaments
Amphiboly
Periplocus
Epi(multi)logue

Expressive Form: A Conceptual Approach to Computational Design
Spon Press, 2003

With the increased use of computers, architecture has found itself in the midst of a plethora of possible uses. This book combines theoretical enquiry with practical implementation offering a unique perspective on the use of computers related to architectureal form and design. Notions of exaggeration, hybrid, kinetic, algorithmic, fold and warp are examined from different points of view: historical, mathematical, philosophical or critical. Generously illustrated, this book is a source of inspiration for students and professionals.

The mode of utilizing computers in architecture today is vague, inexplicit, and, often, arbitrary. Designers tend to conceptualize entities or processes and then enter, manipulate and print using computer systems. Often, theories of design and form are "translated" into computational ones, merely to participate in the digital fashion. This situation creates confusion, misunderstanding, and inconsistency to both students and practitioners over the appropriate use of computers in architecture and design. Challenging these assumptions, this book offers an appropriate theoretical context for computer-based experimentations, explorations, and form-making. By employing computational and formal theories, the author offers a theoretical bridge between the establishment of the past and the potential of the future. With the increased use of computers, architecture has found itself in the midst of a plethora of possible uses. The book offers some alternative directions, which combine theoretical inquiry with practical implementation. Notions of exaggeration, hybrid, kinetic, algorithmic, fold and warp are examined from different points of view: historical, mathematical, philosophi or critical. Expressive Form offers a unique perspective on the use of computers related to aesthetics and specifically to architectural form and design. As an architect, professor and computer scientist, Kostas Terzidis is able to discern the unique and worthwhile features of computation as they apply to the idiosyncratic world of architectural design. He provides a source of inspiration for students and professionals.