When The Going Gets Tough, The Pluripotent Get Going: Resilient Developmental Models (2008)
article⁄When The Going Gets Tough, The Pluripotent Get Going: Resilient Developmental Models (2008)
abstract⁄Mechanisms of biological development, such as in embryogenesis, offer promising models for resilient architectural systems wellsuited to volatile or unpredictable contextual conditions. The resilience of embryonic development as a process is such that successful development’success’ defined here as that which results in the birth of an organism that can survivecan sustain extreme shifts in a normal developmental process, triggered by mutations, environmental pressures, injury, or experimental intervention. More specifically, biological development combines mechanisms of standardization with mechanisms of customization to create openended or what biologists call pluripotent systemspoised ‘potent’ to develop into a wide range ‘pluri’ of potential formswhich we can endeavor to reproduce mimetically. This paper considers biomimesis less a matter of replicating these developmental mechanisms physically or formally, but rather borrowing aspects of the mechanisms’ operation in order to test project outcomes digitally. The discipline of developmental biology affords a virtually readymade conceptual framework and terminology to guide an openended digital methodology, in the hope of incorporating increasing degrees of resilience into the resulting design work. Searching for a capacity to sustain a similar fluidity of differentiation afforded by organisms in early development, we explore a pluripotent architecture for which differentiation might occur over time, and which might be better able to absorb volatility.
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| Year |
2008 |
| Authors |
Hynes, Hugh. |
| Issue |
Silicon + Skin: Biological Processes and Computation, |
| Pages |
88-93 |
| Library link |
N/A |
| Entry filename |
when-going-gets-tough-pluripotent-get |
