Livable Cities - London AMPS | City, University of London Page 222 EXPERIMENTS AND QUALITATIVE EVOLUTIONARY METHOD Students in Aalto University’s course of Urban Design and Planning Capstone Project (2023) were asked to follow steps for qualitative evolutionary design and produce designs with social innovation for two sites: Tervasaari Island in Helsinki, Finland, and Ethelburga Estate in London, UK. This project was a collaboration with Royal College of Art in London and Shibaura Institute of Technology in Tokyo. Altogether 23 students, six teachers and three researchers participated this endeavour. It was emphasised to the students that it is not enough to design purely functional artefacts, but especially social innovation and simultaneously 1) support significantly higher societal goals through creative work without compromising the quality of architecture, and 2) to facilitate evolutionary, place-based experiences that support sustainable, long-term life-cycle development. Our method, which is described in the next chapter, is based on dividing the design into manipulable parts – “modules” (that could also be called a “pattern”), – which can evolve in an asynchronous manner. Modular design states that a product is made of subsystems that are joined together to create a full product.12 The built environment can in this way be divided into components with different life cycles. Design method These were their steps for qualitative evolutionary design: 1. Define the input. This means deciding on the “module” whose performance will be measured, including its extents and type. This structure of division may be a new way to comprehend environment consisting of patterns (combinations of spaces and/or volumes, and their use) and allow the non- synchronised development of these. For example, a city block or a building can be divided into unconventional parts that can evolve in their own pace without integrated control – such as an entrance, roof-scape, or ground floor spaces combined. This type of thinking is rather new for building architecture and urban design and planning, where it has traditionally been the totality which is supposed to be the key unit of development – Gesamtkunstwerk – and not its allochronic components. A module in our task could be a whole area, a block, a public space, a street, parking places, urban squares, ground level spaces of blocks, the roof-scape, entrances, or alike. This can be a combination of traditional components of architecture or new ones in an unorthodox manner (e.g., addressing all garbage sheds of the area at the same time). 2. Select your qualitative topic. This could also be called the parameter, or the characteristic goal. Start by clearly defining the qualitative goal you want to. 3. Research how the success of your specific goal – its ”fitness measure criteria” has been evaluated earlier and elsewhere. Use internet and literature in this sub-task to understand which have usually been the criteria for evaluating how successful your solution for the input is. Don't worry if the criteria appear obscure or confusing – this “sweatiness” is typical for qualitative criteria. 4. Decide on your own measurement technique. Dictate the qualitative criteria that will be used to evaluate the quality of each design solution within your selected module and topic. Decide on how you are going to evaluate the success of your designs, based on the information from the previous stage and your assessment of that. This step requires turning the qualitative criteria into quantitative data in a creative way. 5. Generate an initial “population” of design alternatives – a set of different quick designs. These design solutions should be diverse and cover a wide range of possible directions. This forms the initial “rough sketch” – components and alternatives, with which the system is allowed to only barely work by answering to the fitness measurement criteria but is not necessarily yet much developed. Using generative AI imaging tools (Dall-e, Midjourney etc.) is used in this stage and in the following steps.
