Digital affordances: emerging knowledge and cognition in design

This chapter stresses the need for a critical understanding of the structure and state of the knowledge that has emerged with the new digital approaches in architectural design and production. This chapter will review and assess the emerging technologies, tools and processes facilitating the design and realization of digital design, with a special focus on freeform architectural practice. Digital technologies not only assist designers in the creation and realization of complex architectural forms, but the different capabilities they provide also start to define new tasks, values and concepts which will shape the image of the emerging design practice. The semantic relationships and dependencies between the emerging properties of architectural form and the digital processes characterize the contextual and dynamic nature of the domain knowledge. The emerging design knowledge is identified in a technological and interdisciplinary context, with comparisons of the digital and predigital design culture in order to highlight the transformation of established understanding about design and its associated knowledge