Swarm Intelligence in Architectural Design

Swarm is the aggregate motion of insects in nature, like birds’ flock and fishes’ school. From the book, “Emergence”, by Steven Johnson, he wrote about creating a “form” of living on having emergence logic from the smallest scale as ants into a larger scale as cities. He tries to define how the swarm logic of ants’ behavior could give the example of the way of living for the human level.
For architects, swarm intelligence examines the role of agency within the generative design process. There is a fundamental relationship between swarm behaviors, boids system, human activities, urbanism, tectonic and space generation. The intent of this project is to jointly investigate fundamental processes in using swarm intelligence to improve design efficiency at multiple scales.

Chapter 1

Natural Swarm

Simulation

Chapter 2

Visual Arts

Chapter 3

Dynamic Structure

Connection between Particle points

Paths of the movement

Chapter 4

Transforming Module

Chapter 5

Automatic drawing

Creating Options

The parameters of environmental inputs and the movement of the attractor points will impact the output of the drawing, which representing particles’ movement

Design decision: Elevation drawing, Structural Model & 3D Printed Objects

Chapter 6

Urbanism

The migration flows of startup investment act like animals swarming in between cities. Events for startups happen around the bay area because of the increasing number of new startups. Through data science, we see the swarm behavior of social activities in the digital world.

The flocking incubator is an architectural prototype based on swarm behavior and affected by the environmental forces digitally and naturally.
It would generate a new kind of mobile public space for the startup companies, following the investment and events, and migrate above the cities.