06-07

Tassos's Blog

Sunday 04 February 2007

just some interesting stuff I came across...

"Visual Aesthetic Evolutionary Design Links" website hosts a good ammount of links on evolutionary design. It led me to Karl Sim's webpage who was discussed during last Friday's Generative Space session and to Peter Bentley's web page, who will be giving us a lecture this coming Friday on the same module...

Jon Bird is conducting some interesting research at the Department of Informatics at the University of Sussex on AI and cognitive science. He presented two papers at the GA 2006 conference we attended at Milan during December. One was about "lessons from collaboratively building a generative artwork" (with Dustin Stokes) and the other one about "homeostasis". For the latter topic he maintains a very informative webpage which also hosts an applet that illustrates homeostatic behaviour and was developed using Processing.

CECA (Centre for Evolutionary Computing in Architecture) is a research group at the School of Architecture at the University of East London. These guys run an MSc programme with a research field similar to ours and a focus on algorithmical approaches towards architectural design. A lot of interesting material is on their wiki page: projects, papers, tutorials. Some of the people involved in CECA (Finucane, Derix, Coates) were also presenting their work at the GA 2006 conference as well.

Notes on Boids: If you're doing anything relating to swarms, schools, flocks, herds or packs, then maybe it's a good idea to make a bookmark of Craig Reynold's website. Also check out his Steering Behaviors For Autonomous Characters page.

Morfogen: Blog on generative design.

Robotecture: Interactive Architecture: lots of stuff

Posted by tassos at 22h12

Friday 02 February 2007

Tensegrity - Geodesy - Polyhedra - "Springs"

I recently developed an interest in space-frame lattice structures and began a bit of a research on the web. One thing led to another and I started looking into the fields listed in the title, which are more or less interrelated... This entry is sort of a mapping of the places I visited, just in case anyone else is interested.

"Tensegrity" (tensional integrity) is a term coined by Buckminster Fuller to describe a structural property of certain shapes that allows them to maintain their geometric characteristics through an internal tensional behaviour of the system when it is under stress. (source: http://www.tensegrity.com/)

By investigating this property, Fuller developed the design of geodesic structures and domes, on which the dome of the Eden Project designed by Grimshaw Architects was based.

French architect David Georges Emmerich also investigated similar structures at the same time with Fuller (50's), but independantly. He called them "structures tendues et autotendantes" (prestressed tensile structures). It is also said that even earlier (1920's) the Russian Constructivists were the first to explore such structural properties. (source: http://www.intergate.com/~bobwb/ts/tenseg/book/chap1.html)

Many physical structures found in nature possess "tensegral" properties (radiolaria). It also seems that modelling and simulating such tensegrity structures through programming and more specifically through "spring-structures" can yield interesting results. This is the basis on which I am posting this entry, as I find a potential in exploring this theme through our course...

This is just a list of what I came across, certainly not all that's there... hope u find sth of interest...

Tensegrity:

• http://www.tensegrity.com/ - A fully dedicated site.

• http://www.kennethsnelson.net/ - Kenneth Snelson's (Buckminster Fuller's student) site.

• or http://www.intergate.com/~bobwb/ - Bob Burkhardt has written a lot on tensegrity. Look into these books-articles-papers.

• http://timtyler.org/ - This guy has a massive ammount of material... Check out hexadecimal domes, their relative links but also cellular automata and atoms or go through the rest of the websites that Tim Tyler hosts, which are enormous in number and very diverse in content :-). Definately do check out the "Springie" application - really darn good (!) and written in Java.

• http://www.antiprism.com/index.html - Polyhedra

• http://members.ozemail.com.au/~llan/polhed.html - just a classification of some polyhedra

• http://listserv.buffalo.edu/cgi-bin/wa?A1=ind0411&L=geodesic&I=-3 - the "geodesic archives" forum at the University at Buffalo. Some interesting posts.

And some links on Springs and Spring-applets:

• http://www.sodaplay.com/constructor/index.htm - Probably the most famous one and one of the oldest. Soda is based in London and in fact one of these guys (Ed Burton) is giving a lecture at the Architectural Association on Feb 14th (unfortunately, we'll probably be at Bath at the time). With Soda Contructor you can make tensegrity creatures and test their behaviour under forces. Also check out the articles about Soda on Generator.x

Other spring structure applets can also be found at:

• http://processing.org/exhibition/works/sodaprocessing/index_link.html - Built with Processing by Soda's Ed Burton.

• http://users.design.ucla.edu/~mflux/p5/springsmass/applet/ - Built with Processing.

• http://www.sw3d.net/ - Built with Processing.

• http://www.v3ga.net/show.php?id=1&type=0 - Yet another one built with Processing.

• http://springie.com/ - Excellent java applet by Tim Tyler that illustrates tensegrity structures under stress.

• http://fluidiom.v2.nl/index.html - Gerald De Jong has created Fluidiom, an application for creating and evolving virtual tensegrity creatures in an artificial life environment. His latest project is Darwin@Home. There is also a video where he discusses his work thoroughly.

• http://www.modulobe.com/Modulobe.html (artificial creature creation)

• http://www.shapeofspace.org/springdance/
• http://www.jcraft.com/jspringies/
• http://people.ifm.liu.se/freka/particleworld/

And finally, following Sean's very precise lead on John Frazer (whose work on tensegrity structures I ignored), this is the link to Frazer's book "An evolutionary architecture". As the name suggests, the book is mainly (but not only as it appears) about an evolutionary approach towards design. In fact, it is probably one of the earliest (if not the earliest) such approach regarding architecture.

Posted by tassos at 22h22

Tuesday 05 December 2006

Kevin Kelly - "Out of Control"

Kevin Kelly is one of the co-founding members of Wired magazine. He is also the author of the inspiring book Out of Control, which discusses the contemporary convergence between biology and machines. The whole book can be read online on Kevin Kelly's website.

Posted by aacstudent at 21h41