Therese Tierney, Generative Systems

Therese Tierney's writings on digital design again deal with how we as designers have to deal with still retaining the human design element. Computers, she says, can be over restrictive and seriously undermine the architect's role.

The computer thinks linearly- if they were to design, it would be a parts-to-whole design process with no intuitive knowledge about the site, project, surroundings, historical setting, etc. Computers can only deal with the numbers and facts given to them. It is the architect who needs to actually design the buildings, using the digital medias as only tools.
One phrase she uses a lot is the "generation of form" and how new technologies informs it. She says it is constrained randomness. There is a set of constraints- numbers for the computer, although we as humans have the same restraints, we just call them something different- that inform designs. A computer can read this in relation to the form, and "randomly" generates form. But the subjectivity of the designer meets with the computers' systematic approach to bring new things into being, new solutions into emergence.