The Gestalt psychologist Wolfgang Köhler reviewed Norbert Wiener’s Cybernetics soon after it appeared in 1948. Köhler argued that machines and calculating lack insight. Warren McCulloch, Wiener’s fellow cyberneticist who used neurons to calculate, agreed: “the problem of insight, or intuition, or invention – call it what you will – we do not understand.” Today, this goes for objectoriented programming and design patterns, and foremost, for AI: “Insight remains handmade.” But embedding and recursion have been used in shape grammars since their start in 1972, to foster insight (seeing) in calculating with shapes, schemas, and rules. This turns calculating into painting, as it subsumes Alberti’s famous account of art and design in De Statua. Alberti’s landscapes (shapes) alter freely in an open-ended process that puts seeing first.
Professor George Stiny is a theorist of design and computation and has been on the faculty of MIT Department of Architecture since 1996. Educated at MIT and at UCLA, where he received a PhD in Engineering, Stiny has also taught at the University of Sydney, the Royal College of Art (London), the Open University, and the University of California at Los Angeles. Stiny's particular contribution to the field has been in the invention and refinement of the idea of shape grammars, and his work stands as a critique of the vast majority of existing computer-aided design systems. He is the author of Pictorial and Formal Aspects of Shape and Shape Grammars, Algorithmic Aesthetics: Computer Models for Criticism and Design in the Arts with J. Gips, and most recently of Shape: talking about seeing and doing.
