Emergent Design: a crosscutting research program and design curriculum integrating architecture and artificial intelligence

We describe a design process, Emergent Design, that draws upon techniques and approaches from the disciplines of computer science and artificial intelligence in addition to architecture. The process focuses on morphology, emphasizing the emergent and adaptive properties of architectural form and complex organizations. Emergent Design explicitly uses software tools that allow the exploration of locally defined, bottom-up emergent spatial systems. We describe our Emergent Design software, inspired by concepts from Artificial Life, that is open-source and written in Java. This software is an integral part of a curriculum to teach Emergent Design that has original content and pedagogical aspects.