Understanding the hermeneutics of digital materiality in contemporary architectural modelling: a material engagement per
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ORIGINAL ARTICLE
Understanding the hermeneutics of digital materiality in contemporary architectural modelling: a material engagement perspective Kåre Stokholm Poulsgaard1 · Lambros Malafouris2 Received: 15 December 2019 / Accepted: 1 August 2020 © The Author(s) 2020
Abstract This article develops a framework for analysing how digital software and models become mediums for creative imagination in architectural design. To understand the hermeneutics of these relationships, we develop key concepts from Material Engagement Theory (MET) and Postphenomenology (PP). To push these frameworks into the realm of digital design, we develop the concept of Digital Materiality. Digital Materiality describes the way successive layers of mathematics, code, and software come to mediate enactive perception, and the possibilities of creative material engagement actualised in work with software. Just as molecular materials come to transform action with material objects, so digital materiality comes to enable and transform creative practices with computers. Digital architectural design form a new space for ongoing enactive discovery and creativity through manipulation of digital models and their underlying software environments. By shifting relationships within their digital models, architects can direct their attention, intention, and imagination towards widely different aspects of the model. Here, creative imagination becomes a fundamentally situated activity where mind emerges through dynamic interaction between a variety of embodied, material, and cultural domains. Keywords Postphenomenology · Material engagement theory · Architecture · Design · ICT · Parametric · Material culture
1 Digital design in a postphenomenological perspective In contemporary architecture, computational tools let designers build intricate digital models where geometry translates to data, and data to geometry. These models allow for intuitive creation of advanced 3D geometries, fluid shapes, and complex construction details. They integrate the mathematics and numerical calculations that underlie these into computational environments that expand from being
* Lambros Malafouris [email protected] Kåre Stokholm Poulsgaard [email protected] 1
St John’s College and Institute for Science Innovation and Society, University of Oxford, 64 Banbury Road, OX2 6PN Oxford, United Kingdom
Hertford College and Institute of Archaeology, University of Oxford, 36 Beaumont Street, OX1 2PG, Oxford, United Kingdom
2
design tools to also becoming instruments for creative discovery for architects. What, then, is the role of software in architectural design? Who designs, the architect or the digital tool? How can we begin to understand the computational environment as a medium for enactive discovery (Malafouris 2011) and creative material engagement (Malafouris 2014, 2019, 2020; Koukouti and Malafouris 2020; Poulsgaard and Malafouris 2017; Poulsgaard 2017; Clowes 2018, 2019)? With the growing prevalence of software in architecture, digitally
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