Digital Architecture Beyond Computers explores the deep history of digital architecture, tracing design concepts as far back as the Renaissance and connecting them with the latest software used by designers today. It develops a critical account of how the tools and techniques of digital design have emerged, and allows designers to deepen their understanding of the digital tools they use every day. What aesthetic, spatial, and philosophical concepts converge within the digital tools architects employ? What is their history? And what kinds of techniques and designs have they given rise to? This book explores the answers to these questions, showing how digital architecture brings together complex ideas and trajectories which span across several domains and have evolved over many centuries. It sets out to unpack these ideas, trace their origin and permeation into architecture, and re-examine their use in contemporary software. Chapters are arranged around the histories of nine 'fragments' – each a fundamental concept embedded in popular CAD applications: database, layers and fields, parametrics, pixel, programme, randomness, scanning, topology, and voxel/maxel – with each theme examined through a series of historical and contemporary case studies. The book thus connects the digital design process with architectural history and theory, allowing designers and theorists alike to develop more analytical and critical tools with which to conceptualise digital design and its software.

Provides practical examples of how to interface with peripherals using RS232, SPI, motor control, interrupts, wireless, and analog-to-digital conversion. This book covers the fundamentals of digital logic design and reinforces logic concepts through the design of a MIPS microprocessor.

This easy to read textbook provides an introduction to computer architecture, while focusing on the essential aspects of hardware that programmers need to know. The topics are explained from a programmer’s point of view, and the text emphasizes consequences for programmers. Divided in five parts, the book covers the basics of digital logic, gates, and data paths, as well as the three primary aspects of architecture: processors, memories, and I/O systems. The book also covers advanced topics of parallelism, pipelining, power and energy, and performance. A hands-on lab is also included. The second edition contains three new chapters as well as changes and updates throughout.

The first digital turn in architecture changed our ways of making; the second changes our ways of thinking. Almost a generation ago, the early software for computer aided design and manufacturing (CAD/CAM) spawned a style of smooth and curving lines and surfaces that gave visible form to the first digital age, and left an indelible mark on contemporary architecture. But today's digitally intelligent architecture no longer looks that way. In The Second Digital Turn, Mario Carpo explains that this is because the design professions are now coming to terms with a new kind of digital tools they have adopted—no longer tools for making but tools for thinking. In the early 1990s the design professions were the first to intuit and interpret the new technical logic of the digital age: digital mass-customization (the use of digital tools to mass-produce variations at no extra cost) has already changed the way we produce and consume almost everything, and the same technology applied to commerce at large is now heralding a new society without scale—a flat marginal cost society where bigger markets will not make anything cheaper. But today, the unprecedented power of computation also favors a new kind of science where prediction can be based on sheer information retrieval, and form finding by simulation and optimization can replace deduction from mathematical formulas. Designers have been toying with machine thinking and machine learning for some time, and the apparently unfathomable complexity of the physical shapes they are now creating already expresses a new form of artificial intelligence, outside the tradition of modern science and alien to the organic logic of our mind.

This book shows how to best present theoretical-technical information, data and images, making this title itself a cutting-edge additon to literature on the subject. The impact of digital technology on architecture has reshaped how may architects and designers work, software and hardware developments allow a greater degree of articulation and experimentation, advance visualisation of contextual impact and use can help to solve or avoid problems, and the technical advantages of applied digitisation are many and take many forms. These issues examined and discussed fully in this volume.

Yehuda Kalay offers a comprehensive exposition of the principles, methods, & practices that underlie architectural computing. He discusses pertinent aspects of information technology, analyses the benefits & drawbacks of particular computational methods, & looks into the future.

How to repair the disconnect between designers and users, producers and consumers, and tech elites and the rest of us: toward a more democratic internet. In this provocative book, Ramesh Srinivasan describes the internet as both an enabler of frictionless efficiency and a dirty tangle of politics, economics, and other inefficient, inharmonious human activities. We may love the immediacy of Google search results, the convenience of buying from Amazon, and the elegance and power of our Apple devices, but it's a one-way, top-down process. We're not asked for our input, or our opinions—only for our data. The internet is brought to us by wealthy technologists in Silicon Valley and China. It's time, Srinivasan argues, that we think in terms beyond the Valley. Srinivasan focuses on the disconnection he sees between designers and users, producers and consumers, and tech elites and the rest of us. The recent Cambridge Analytica and Russian misinformation scandals exemplify the imbalance of a digital world that puts profits before inclusivity and democracy. In search of a more democratic internet, Srinivasan takes us to the mountains of Oaxaca, East and West Africa, China, Scandinavia, North America, and elsewhere, visiting the “design labs” of rural, low-income, and indigenous people around the world. He talks to a range of high-profile public figures—including Elizabeth Warren, David Axelrod, Eric Holder, Noam Chomsky, Lawrence Lessig, and the founders of Reddit, as well as community organizers, labor leaders, and human rights activists.. To make a better internet, Srinivasan says, we need a new ethic of diversity, openness, and inclusivity, empowering those now excluded from decisions about how technologies are designed, who profits from them, and who are surveilled and exploited by them.