Editorial

In this Special Issue of International Journal of Architectural Computing (IJAC) conducted by SIGraDi’s team of editors, we suggested that authors reflected on the same topic: Design with Freedom that was proposed in our call for papers for the XVIII Iberoamerican Society of Digital Graphics, SIGraDi 2014, held at Universidad de la República, Montevideo, Uruguay.

Freedom here can have two meanings. On the one hand, it can be understood as the possibility of overcoming operational limitations with the use of new tools and computational technologies. On the other hand, it can also have philosophical meanings in terms of design as a process and as a social activity. Of course, we do not want to suggest that designers did not have freedom with computerised tools, but that the new ones as computational tools, can certainly add a new layer of flexibility, since they allow the exploration of possibilities in a number fixed only by our own restrictions or the determining context. The aim is for us to decide when such tools become allies in our process, so that they can also reduce the time in change management, while allowing us to select solutions that are more precise. Especially concerning representation and simulation – as in parametric modelling – and fabrication – as in flexible manufacturing systems.

For Dorta, Kinayoglu and Hoffmann in Hyve-3D and the 3D Cursor: Architectural co-design with freedom in Virtual Reality, freer representation can enhance collaboration. They describe a hybrid 3D Virtual Environment, which allows fully collaborative design within an immersive sketching system, manipulating 3D objects using tablets, breaking the boundaries between the hand and the computer screen.

Jutraz and Le Moine in Breaking out: New freedoms in urban (re)design work by adding immersive environments also discuss collaborative immersive environments, but in their case, deep immersive collaboration on design could free the participant’s mind and increase the degree of freedom in the design/planning process. Their system also aims at the integration between government, professionals and the public in an urban design context.

Freedom in information modelling is discussed by Nakano, Bohn and Wakita in Development of educational-use computational fluid dynamics programming environment and workshop, who describe a teaching experience that incorporates design possibilities, using their own fabrication tool, with the assistance of an educational-use environment for computational fluid dynamics (CFD) through scripting, during a performative design process.

Another example is provided by Lima, Kos and Paraizo in Algorithmic approach toward Transit-Oriented Development neighborhoods:(Para)metric tools for evaluating and proposing rapid transit-based districts. They describe an algorithmic system that evaluates walkability and helps in the generation of transit-oriented development neighbourhoods in order to significantly contribute to a process of responsible planning and, ultimately, to mitigate global warming.

Freedom in the generation of forms through the use of text-based programming languages is the subject of Leitão, Caetano and Correia’s paper: Processing architecture.

Regarding manufacturing, Yanagawa in reIndustrializing Architecture suggests that digital fabrication could enable individual initiatives, thus reversing social class disparity that has been aggravated by mass production.

Finally, the last two papers deal with more philosophical aspects of design freedom. Chaszar and Joyce in Generating freedom: Questions of flexibility in digital design and architectural computation, question the freedom offered by digital processes and our ability to explore and make sense of such a large design solution space with an ever-increasing number of design alternatives automatically generated. It also addresses the controversy with a specific focus on parametric-associative modelling and genetic-programming methods of generative design. Activist systems: Futuring with living models from Roudavski and Jahn, in turn, suggest that design should be itself a mechanism of freedom; it should be questioned and changed, in order to release us from the consumer society. Moreover, they suggest that modelling has an important role in the task of redesigning design.

We would like to thank our reviewers, who have diligently read and carefully evaluated each paper received, making sure that they comply with IJAC’s high scientific standards, and we hope that our readers will enjoy this issue, which, we believe, will be able to inspire future research projects.