Software Comes to Matter: Toward a Material History of Computational Design
A metaphor of weightlessness and immateriality dominates computational discourses about design. Digital information, it is often assumed, travels seamlessly through invisible networks in its disembodied binary form—existing merely as a symbolic entity. Despite recent appeals to design’s materiality,...
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | en_US |
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MIT Press
2015
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| Online Access: | http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/100540 |
| _version_ | 1826200053019049984 |
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| author | Cardoso Llach, Daniel |
| author2 | Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Architecture |
| author_facet | Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Architecture Cardoso Llach, Daniel |
| author_sort | Cardoso Llach, Daniel |
| collection | MIT |
| description | A metaphor of weightlessness and immateriality dominates computational discourses about design. Digital information, it is often assumed, travels seamlessly through invisible networks in its disembodied binary form—existing merely as a symbolic entity. Despite recent appeals to design’s materiality, particularly in discourses about digital fabrication in architecture, material formations are generally considered an effect of these ethereal transactions. Thus, the materiality of digital information, its (often messy) substrates—such as wires, voltages, disks, and drives, as well as the socio-technical processes involved in their definition and production—are black-boxed: hidden from view. This article explores the intellectual and material history of numerically controlled machines, and of the software that drove them, and shows that a new theoretical understanding of materials and geometry as computable, linked to the emergence of software and numerically controlled machines, emerged from the Cold War era entanglement of military, industrial, and academic interests. I show how in their quest to automate machine tools, the first numerical control researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) codified the cognitive and bodily roles of machine tool operators, as well as the properties of materials and machines, thus uncovering new questions of data storage, management, and exchange. Confronting these questions, numerical control researchers developed new languages for geometric and material inscription—software—that were crucially informed by the physical constraints imposed by available storage media, such as punched paper tape. From this negotiation between symbolic abstractions and material systems, new programming techniques and, crucially, the first theory of computer-aided design emerged. Thus, software started to become both a vehicle for and an expression of a technical and conceptual reconfiguration of design, linked to the manipulation of materials, engineering efficiency, and militaristic control. I intend to show that software, understood as an organized set of declarative statements with both semantic and operational values, can itself be seen as a design theory encoding this reconfiguration. |
| first_indexed | 2024-09-23T11:30:13Z |
| format | Article |
| id | mit-1721.1/100540 |
| institution | Massachusetts Institute of Technology |
| language | en_US |
| last_indexed | 2024-09-23T11:30:13Z |
| publishDate | 2015 |
| publisher | MIT Press |
| record_format | dspace |
| spelling | mit-1721.1/1005402022-09-27T19:58:55Z Software Comes to Matter: Toward a Material History of Computational Design Cardoso Llach, Daniel Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Architecture Cardoso Llach, Daniel A metaphor of weightlessness and immateriality dominates computational discourses about design. Digital information, it is often assumed, travels seamlessly through invisible networks in its disembodied binary form—existing merely as a symbolic entity. Despite recent appeals to design’s materiality, particularly in discourses about digital fabrication in architecture, material formations are generally considered an effect of these ethereal transactions. Thus, the materiality of digital information, its (often messy) substrates—such as wires, voltages, disks, and drives, as well as the socio-technical processes involved in their definition and production—are black-boxed: hidden from view. This article explores the intellectual and material history of numerically controlled machines, and of the software that drove them, and shows that a new theoretical understanding of materials and geometry as computable, linked to the emergence of software and numerically controlled machines, emerged from the Cold War era entanglement of military, industrial, and academic interests. I show how in their quest to automate machine tools, the first numerical control researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) codified the cognitive and bodily roles of machine tool operators, as well as the properties of materials and machines, thus uncovering new questions of data storage, management, and exchange. Confronting these questions, numerical control researchers developed new languages for geometric and material inscription—software—that were crucially informed by the physical constraints imposed by available storage media, such as punched paper tape. From this negotiation between symbolic abstractions and material systems, new programming techniques and, crucially, the first theory of computer-aided design emerged. Thus, software started to become both a vehicle for and an expression of a technical and conceptual reconfiguration of design, linked to the manipulation of materials, engineering efficiency, and militaristic control. I intend to show that software, understood as an organized set of declarative statements with both semantic and operational values, can itself be seen as a design theory encoding this reconfiguration. 2015-12-28T18:05:36Z 2015-12-28T18:05:36Z 2015-07 Article http://purl.org/eprint/type/JournalArticle 0747-9360 1531-4790 http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/100540 Llach, Daniel Cardoso. “Software Comes to Matter: Toward a Material History of Computational Design.” Design Issues 31, no. 3 (July 2015): 41–54. © 2015 Massachusetts Institute of Technology en_US http://dx.doi.org/10.1162/DESI_a_00337 Design Issues Article is made available in accordance with the publisher's policy and may be subject to US copyright law. Please refer to the publisher's site for terms of use. application/pdf MIT Press MIT Press |
| spellingShingle | Cardoso Llach, Daniel Software Comes to Matter: Toward a Material History of Computational Design |
| title | Software Comes to Matter: Toward a Material History of Computational Design |
| title_full | Software Comes to Matter: Toward a Material History of Computational Design |
| title_fullStr | Software Comes to Matter: Toward a Material History of Computational Design |
| title_full_unstemmed | Software Comes to Matter: Toward a Material History of Computational Design |
| title_short | Software Comes to Matter: Toward a Material History of Computational Design |
| title_sort | software comes to matter toward a material history of computational design |
| url | http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/100540 |
| work_keys_str_mv | AT cardosollachdaniel softwarecomestomattertowardamaterialhistoryofcomputationaldesign |