Abstract
The XXI Congress of the Iberoamerican Society of Digital Graphics, SIGraDi—held at Universidad de Concepción, Chile, in 2017—advanced the topic of “Resilient Design” as the fundamental strategy for sustainability. In the same direction, this special issue of the International Journal of Architectural Computing (IJAC) seeks to promote thoughtful and creative solutions that incorporate the vulnerabilities of the ecosystems and the built environment as part of the design challenges. This embraces systems redundancy and human-based designs from a computational design thinking approach, influencing the academia and the architectural practice.
Resilient Design transcends scales. Its strategies encompass cities, landscapes, buildings, materials, structures, organizations, humans and data, as well as temporal dimensions. This IJAC issue is a collection of six papers that introduce diverse, flexible, and feasible resilient systems, which interactions extend from immediate to long-term, anticipating a dynamic future. The topics encompass from global to local territories and from networks to interactive design installations, including the architectural design approaches and its specifics.
The introductory paper for this issue, “Computational Modeling for Climate Change: Simulating and Visualizing a Resilient Landscape Architecture Design Approach” by Ackerman, Cave, Lin, and Stillwell, presents a broader-scale approach of analyzing the current conditions of storm flooding and urban heat island in two zones, alleviating the impact of climate change on urban landscapes through simulators of computational fluid dynamics, erosion and sedimentation patterns, coastal flooding, and sea level rise, using prototypes to visualize the possible successful interventions to counterbalance the impact.
Gardner, Trilsbeck, Fabbri, Haeusler, Zavoleas, and Page propose improving a coastal marine environment, by three-dimensional (3D) printing a complex geometry with the resilient and capricious material of clay, in their paper “Meeting in the middle: Hybrid Clay 3D fabrication processes for bio-reef structures.” Their research presents the challenges of human–machine interaction, focusing on human intuition and material adaptation in a collaborative practice with machine’s efficiency and precision, as a hybrid fabrication process.
Approaching the building scale, Zarzycki and Decker, in their “Climate-Adaptive Buildings: Systems and Materials” paper, address, from a computational approach, the physical computing research studies with kinetic pneumatic structures, emphasizing on high-performance, and strong and hybrid design solutions, using kinetics and intelligent materials. The discussion focuses on the future impact of these technologies on resilient and high-performance designs.
The “Design of a Post-disaster Shelter through Soft Computing,” by Karaoglan and Alaçam, introduces the exploration of temporary shelters design, utilizing soft computational methods and multi-objective Genetic Algorithms. The goal is to produce a series of shelter configurations, evaluating them by user type and through a variety of disaster scenarios, using a Fuzzy Neural Tree model for knowledge-driven design, with the goal of mass customization.
At the information scale, this issue’s fifth paper: “Campus regenerative design supported by university Wi-Fi connections” by Kos, Mangrich, Pavan, Gomes, Oliveira, and Martina, presents the analyses and visualization of Wi-Fi cellular location and interaction data, by college on campus. The research specifically focuses on understanding the dynamics of a university campus for promoting campus integration, supporting resilience endeavors. The long-term goal is the re-design and innovation of the university campus landscape and the re-generation of ecosystems from a resilient design approach.
The Resilient Design issue concludes with the paper “A Shared Realities Workflow for Interactive Design using Virtual Reality and 3D Depth Sensing” by Krietemeyer, Bartosh, and Covington, which presents the implementation of an interactive system, installed in the Rubenstein Museum of Science and Technology, with the goal of supporting the interactive and collaborative practices in architectural design to enable visitors to explore energy datasets through gestural interaction. The focus is on the software development methods for human interaction using 3D depth sensing for producing user point cloud data.
The design scales encompassed in this issue include cities, ecosystems, landscapes, buildings, structures, materials, organizations, individuals, information, and interactions—advancing Resilient Design as a fundamental strategy for sustainability and revealing experimental solutions. New technologies, simulations, visualizations parametric design, robotic fabrication, smart materials, Human-Computer Interaction, and Virtual Reality, among others, provide the infrastructure for new approaches on Resilient Computational Design. They support transformations of the built environment and territories, aiming to catalyze processes that lean on interdisciplinary and collaborative design approaches, advancing the Resilient Design Thinking culture. The challenges of the Anthropocene, in which human activity has a dominant impact on the environment, such as globalization and migration, promotes a resilient approach at all scales.
Research has shown that humanity surpassed four of its nine Planetary Limits, the safety thresholds for the processes of terrestrial systems fundamental to sustaining life on the planet. We are in a decisive moment, the longer we delay action, the more our future environment is damaged. The responsibility of designing the solutions to steer our systems in a more sustainable direction is on us. We know how to build a resilient planet for generations to come and we must act now.
Finally, this special issue would not have been possible without the generous contribution of our reviewers and the Editorial team of IJAC and SAGE. Together with the authors, we hope that this edition will inspire in our readers’ thoughts on how architectural computing can contribute to a more resilient world.