Morphological Adaptation

Baghdad - Iraq April 21st, 2024

The workshop explores Genetic Algorithms as an exploratory and optimisation process using Snowflake - a newly developed interactive plugin and applies the developed method to design high-rise morphologies in a selected urban context.

The workshop introduces participants to the working principles of engaging with GAs to solve multi-objective optimisation problems first, then moving into a more advanced level of interacting with the algorithm to guide the evolution to reflect the participant's intuition or preference. Using Snowflake, the newly developed interactive plug-in, the learned design process will be applied in the generation of multi-story morphologies on a selected site. Participants will learn how to formulate the design problem as input data to the algorithm and how to interact with the algorithm to guide the generation and selection process. The outcome of the design exercise will incorporate quantitative performance-based objectives and qualitative intuitive ones. The proposed process attempts to create a dialogue between human intuition and genetic algorithms that may enable a varied and richer space of viable design solutions.