Introduction: Distributed intelligence in design
In the world of architecture, the emergent digital technologies have taken a significant role in how we create, collaborate, design and produce. This book attempts to address the current socio-technical transformation in the architectural industry, as a new paradigm. The increasing use of advanced 3D knowledge-rich parametric/generative tools, combined with information modelling systems and digital prototyping technologies, is already enabling radically new ways of designing and coordinating among the many actors in architectural design and production. Architectural and engineering design is becoming more and more a digitally networked practice. This has led to more distributed activities within and across disciplines and involves embedding intelligence in the formation and actualisation of spaces. Innovation in design is no longer recognised as the creation of a single product by a single designer, but as the outcome of an iterative and dynamic coordination of a cross-disciplinary intelligence that is distributed across various digital tools, people and organisations in a social context. The book tries to uncover the ways in which digitisation and digital tools have recently been adopted within the work practices of multidisciplinary firms and the evolving socio-technical networks and organisational infrastructures in architectural practice.
For quite some time now we have been debating the impact ...
