why automation | niyeotomasyonyaniniyeyani

the question continues to linger (thus asks my temporary supervisor) :

but, why automation?

i usually refrain from giving a direct answer. i give some political explanations reminiscent of the situationists which hold some portion of truth (yea automation might be good, my argument through dishwasher). and point towards growing academic and economic interests (more and more intelligent-design-software will flood the market).

but indeed, though vaguely, i can discern why; why this fascination with artificial intelligence, computation, perception, cognitive science, consciousness; why this eagerness to imitate a portion of human behavior which is allegedly a peculiarity of the human being (i.e design activity).

it is just an assault towards the last fortress defending against complete disenchantment. nothing is special about human mind. indeed there is nothing special about anything. this is the researcher as positivist and nihilist. (two in one? don't go too far researcher!)

artificial design and strong AI | yapay tasarım ve yapay zeka için zor problemler

mary lou maher writes in a kind of short introductory text somewhere about AI in the large and AI in the small. she seems to say, it all started with huge ideas in an all-encompassing manner (which in a way, mostly failed), but now it turned into a series of partial and modest patches here and there... if there is an AI in the small, there's an automation-in-the-small as well. and design games is just one of the modest, transient and sometimes not-so-meaningful patches. and i have a new phrase as a substitution to 'design automation', it's 'artificial design'.

[0404010:] i also want to add a note about this phrase: "AI complete"

[wikipedia:]
"In the field of artificial intelligence, the most difficult problems are informally known as AI-complete or AI-hard, implying that the difficulty of these computational problems is equivalent to solving the central artificial intelligence problem—making computers as intelligent as people, or strong AI."

i have been thinking about "task-decomposition" since i've started this project four years ago. design games model was an abstract thinking about sub-tasks of architecture [and "the star-map of architecture" which we had produced as "sanki-dikdörtgen" was strongly related]

now, some sub-tasks in a particular architectural design process are rather mechanical (some even trivial) and can be solved through some calculation (if necessary use well known AI techniques and algorithms), and there are some others, which include a huge set of parameters, objectives, and constraints, that renders them practically impossible to solve; i mean, if you approach them through Good Old Fashioned Artificial Intelligence paradigm (i.e. GOFAI, compare with "sub-symbolic" approaches, which includes evolutionary computation).

these latter types of subtasks are still being researched (as a few examples: distribution of the masses, building orientation, floor plan generation, envelope shape and aperture formation, or complete conceptual formal design in an integrated fashion). but this line of research is still rather underdeveloped, from a designer's point of view. nevertheless there's great hope, 'cause existing techniques seem to be offering several possibilities.

however there is also a third type of sub-tasks, which have to be tackled for a convincing design solution to appear. these include the conceptual (or say, mostly verbal) brief generation and problem setting stages, where the designers need extensive understanding of every aspect of culture as well as a complete ability to understand and manipulate shapes and objects (at least as well as human beings do). a creative and sensitive design proposal which is in dialogue with it's cultural, political, economic, and historical context, doesn't seem to be attainable with mere adaptation or pre-defined rules or constraints or as a result of a mostly random evolution.

are we obliged to wait for a machine, at least as clever as human mind (i.e. for strong-AI program to be accomplished) before entrusting design activity altogether to the machines?