AN INTERVIEW WITH ROLAND SNOOKS
What does a digital design paradigm represent for you in the context of contemporary design practice? RS: All design is now digital. The more critical distinction is between generative computational design and design strategies that is explicit or direct. The volatile conditions that are created in generative design processes enable the emergence of highly intricate geometries and complex organizational structures. In particular generative processes, which engage complex systems, and are capable of emergence, hold great potential for contemporary design practice. How do digital design, new material technologies and fabrication processes develop a societal and cultural impact? RS: Modern architecture and its relationship to massstandardization in construction was closely allied to a societal concern for a unified equality. However the contemporary interest in differentiation and mass-customization has emerged from a wider societal and intellectual concern for complexity theory and a heterogeneous understanding of society – such as Negri and Hardt’s concept of the Multitude. Computational design and robotic fabrication processes are a part of this wider conceptual shift. It is perhaps not so much that design makes a specific societal impact, but rather that architecture and design has an obligation to participate in larger societal and intellectual shifts. How should engineering and design education react to this paradigm shift? RS: It is critical that schools of design teach a conceptual understanding of complex systems and the technical tools to engage with this paradigm. Design schools are currently well placed to take a leading role in adopting and developing new robotic fabrication technologies that are essential to the realization of an increasingly geometrically complex formal sensibility. Snooks is a partner of the experimental architecture practice Kokkugia, and teaches architecture at RMIT University, Columbia University and University of Pennsylvania. Roland’s design research is focused on emergent design processes involving agent-based techniques, and is also the focus of the forthcoming publication “Swarm Intelligence: Architectures of Multi-Agent Systems”.
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EDUCATION