Discussion forum

A discussion forum was set up prior to the actual meeting to stimulate the discussion and focus on the issues that the participants identified to be the most important. Many thanks to the contributors!

Below is the initial call:

Computational models have been at the forefront of design and planning research and practice for some 50 years now. The advent of microcomputers boosted the development of constructs that can automate certain computational tasks and has paved the way for the development of tools that can support or enhance human decision-making abilities. In parallel, a new paradigm for scientific research has been established concerned with the modelling and simulation of complex realities and phenomena in order to explore hypotheses and theories about such phenomena within a controlled environment. These two broad classes of computational constructs allude respectively to the following research questions:
What can computational constructs do in design and planning problems and how?
What can we learn from computational models about design and planning problems and how?

These questions are basically concerned with identifying the structure and role of computational constructs in design and planning and their relation with humans and human societies. This requires a minimum understanding of what is designing and planning.
We start with the premise that designing and planning are processes that can be associated not only with human/cognitive activities but also with the ability of complex systems to evolve and adapt in order to "survive". There is a particular interest in investigating how design and planning phenomena emerge in complex socio-technical systems (that is systems composed by human, physical and artificial components like a building, a city or a human-computer network).
This premise requires an extended view and definition of what designing and planning might be, but also reveals the possibility to understand complex design problems and behaviours drawing from a research field that lies on the intersection between complexity science and cognitive science.
In this intersection we might find some common issues (or phenomena) such as creativity and emergence, evolution and learning, generative and synthetic behaviour, distribution, adaptation and coordination. Understanding and locating such issues (i.e. identifying where these processes are situated) can form a platform to understand the role, function and behaviour of artificial constructs (as tools or as simulators) and their symbiosis with humans.
In particular the ability of design and planning systems to exhibit this sort of abilities (adaptive, learning, evolutionary behaviour) implies the development of tools and models that interact with their human or artificial environment and build their action according to this interaction. Namely, this implies the need to construct computational models that have a situated action as opposed to having a planned action.