CODE1110: Achim Menges - Introduction

Computational Design Thinking – Summary

Sean Alquist and Achim Menges discuss several main points throughout their introduction:

Computation: Alquist and Menges address the difference between computation and computerization and how understanding this difference is key when learning about computation as a whole. They say it ‘can be broken down as methods which either deduce results from values or sets of values, or simply compile or associate given values or sets of values’.

Systems Thinking: They highlight the point of determining things as ‘piecelike’ or ‘patternlike’, where you view something as a ‘structure of components’. They describe every object as a hierarchy of components with specific patterns of distribution.

Parametric Dependencies: Alquist and Menges explain the development of structures regardless of its form and/or formation. Goethe brought this formalism that ‘marks a turning away from the simple structure of end-products and toward the active’.

Emergent Formations: This refers to a process that makes a feature’s appearance more defined due to the background boundary. Crutchfield says ‘an emergent feature also cannot be explicitly represented in the initial and boundary conditions. In short, a feature emerges when the underlying system puts some effort into its creation’.

Designing Computation: Alquist and Menges discuss the validation of computational design as a whole. They talk about how it needs purpose with the intent of solving crucial complexities that will dramatically affect the way we execute certain processes. 

CODE1110: Technology as Machine

In this text, Thomas P. Hughes introduces the fact that society has been evolving with technology and explains how the Germans and the United States worked together to create a more technological involved world. He discusses the fact that America was made up of individual engineering creating their own concepts of technology, whereas Berlin was a mass collaboration of of political influences contributing towards increasing usage towards machine and technological usage.

Multiple technological enthusiasts had contrasting opinions and beliefs with regard to the impact of technology on society and humanity as a whole. He compares their opinions where one half were implying that technology was a substitution for the need of a god, whereas others believed it was a god given creation.

Lewis Mumford, an American intellectual, regarded technology as a balance to the human and that it was an organic necessity in maintaining a healthy lifestyle. He accentuates the idea that technology would improve the moral behavior of society and would be a significant improvement in general.

On the other hand, a German historian, Oswald Spengler, believed that, due to an increase in technology, it would cause the human race to lose their natural and cultural moral and ethical beliefs. He "denies that the west were deploying technology to bring happiness..., but to devastate nature."

Furthermore, Charles Beard regarded the mass production of technological devices to have a positive impact on society and that it would reduce labor, lower economic class, increase transportation efficiency and generate high amounts of jobs in specific fields of technologically savvy environments.