Near Futures: Associative Archetypes

How might it be possible to create computational systems that are sufficiently intuitive to make human experience of space a design driver? Guest-Editor Christian Derix and Prarthana Jagannath describe a series of research projects that were undertaken at the Centre for Evolutionary Computing in Architecture (CECA) at the University of East London between 1999 and 2009, which put aside a structuralist, performance-led approach in favour of new learning models based on artificial neural networks (ANNs) that have the capacity to respond to human activity.