Translating ecological systems models into generative, real-time, form-based visualizations

Abstract

This paper outlines a new methodology for generating and representing site driven biogeochemical forces as dynamic formmakers utilizing Grasshopper 3DM, and its plugin Kangaroo, as translators of ecological systems models (ESM's) into parametric modeling protocols. It also discusses the critical nature of communicating the impacts of these dynamic forces in human cone-of-vision perspectival visualizations that are legible to designers, scientists, and the general public so that they may be utilized as part of larger planning decision making processes. Within today's context of anthropogenically driven climate change architects cannot ignore the increasingly dynamic environmental conditions on our sites, and those forces extending outfrom our sites that produce effects at scales from local to global. ESM's are highly useful tools that communicate relationships between stocks and flows of energy and materials through time. Multi-scalar, complex ecologies have been successfully modeled and quantified utilizing this methodology since the 1950's resulting in a new discipline within ecology and critical new understandings of the pathways through which resources organize, flow, and ultimately generate and maintain systems. This understanding of how systems are structured and function (Archer 1994) often determines their form; however, ESM's are not spatially explicit, rendering them problematic tools to incorporate into our spatially explicit processes and products. Because Grasshopper 3DM's programming language syntax has reciprocity with the syntax of ESM's, these models can be translated relatively straightforwardly by partitioning natural and anthropogenic processes into operational strata. This strata structure establishes a framework into which systems models from various disciplines and of various scales can betranslated including: ecology, hydrology, oceanography, geology, biochemistry, landscape architecture and architecture, while simultaneously facilitating communication between the disciplines necessary for successful generation and calibration of the model, and ultimately the designed site intervention itself.