This module will assess the present state of computer-based design by situating today's digital turn within the long duration of the history of cultural technologies. It will first describe the technical logics of hand-making, mechanical reproductions, and digital making, and highlight the differences between digital variability, manual and artisanal variations, and the mechanical mass-production of identical copies. It will focus on some instances of identical reproduction that were crucial in architectural history, and particularly on the early modern invention of architectural notations and of architectural authorship (the rise of the "Albertian paradigm" in the Renaissance), and on the modernist principle of standardization in the 20th century. It will then outline a brief history of the digital turn and of its theoretical and technological premises: from Post-Modernism and Deconstructivism and the invention of the Deleuzian "Fold" to the spline-dominated environment of the 1990s; from free-form, topology and digital formalism to mass-customization, non-standard seriality and more recent developments in digital interactivity, participatory making and building information modeling (BIM). Lastly, it will discuss the present state of digital design theory, and particularly the issue of BigData, its cultural and epistemological implications, and its consequences for the making of form (theories of emergence, self-organizing systems, form-finding, material computation, complexity, and discretization). Students will test these interpretive patterns by developing a case study of their choice (of a media object, object, building, software, or technology).

The teaching method will include lectures, seminar discussions, and individual tutorials, together with related research methods. Alongside the instructor's presentations, a few guest speakers will present topics derived from their own research or practice. These interventions are scheduled based on the speakers' availability or presence in London, hence in some cases the topics presented by the guests speakers will not be in sync with the chronological timeline covered by the instructor's own presentations. Students will be asked to make an effort to reconstruct an orderly sequence of topics and content in spite of some accidental disorder in the sequence of the guest speakers' talks.