A Call to Build Like Ants

When we see amazing designs often they are substantiated by a theoretical concept from an abstracted philosophical process, as we see it it turns out to be beautiful but we also realize it’s also void of any measurement of value. We often ask ourselves why are such architectural details like this? Is it based on designer’s objectivism or a theoretical movement? Often we find designs unique, grandiose in shapes, colors, feeling, but at the end of the day we ask ourselves why doest it seem to serve a lack of purpose or function?

I wonder why we design the way we do? Why do we start from the end in mind and the final project outcome? Where did this habit come from? Is it from our ancestor who built our statues and monuments? Is it from huge corporations that sell software that dictate that environment? Is it from the protagonist from our books that always end up on the final journey that we pattern ourselves? Is it from how the existing building sciences are taught that creates those adversarial workflows to protect some institutional entrenchments ? Or Is it from the limitations or coercion from our selected materialities?

Because of our singleminedness on a final outcome to arrive at a single destination or single project design, Generative AI has now found our jugular to predict how we behave, perform, function. The principal design agent has now become predictable and his precious creativity wrapped within a singe line of code.

Exponential technology cannot be stopped and disruption is a natural occurrence from further education, the only way to reverse this relationship and use Generative AI as our servant is to deconstruct ourselves to sub-parts, sub-components, and smaller pieces, in order to enlarge the total solution outcome of the lot, of the community, of the ecosystem. The project as the protagonist of the design journey must shift instead to the supporting characters who were the sub-components and to the neighboring stories in order to have multiple permutated project outcomes- a kind of ecosystem of books whom characters traverse with multiple plots and scenarios with multifarious journeys.

The design genius that we look for in every project is now absent for he is attached to the wider utility of his component/s across a generation of projects. Furthermore, project outcomes that are now composed of multiple parts from different design authors is only a chapter of an epic instead of the epic that it was used to. This picture creates a kind of work coordination that is beyond contractual lines but instead about purpose and profound necessities.

In our industrial past, the protagonist has been about the factory and its automation, be it from traditional or more dynamic settings. But from being sub-systems or components the precept on industrialization would now be about deeper connectivity, work semanticity, tokenized outputs, which are all a thrust towards an enlarged view of digitization, or better coined, electrification. This is in other words a movement to Web3.

A built environment that is of this sort must champion function as its analytics, behavior as a design priority attached to a component instead of shape geometry, and computations about network families, inheritance, encapsulation, as newer and first categories for performance design.

The above is Homeqube’s view and thanks to Lego we can call it the “legolization” of artifacts that are composed of objects of software, bioWare , and hardware.

#Web3