If designers no longer produce singular objects, but rather processes that give births to a family of objects, how do they deliver these works in a way that stays true to their dynamic nature?
For small design works, the answer is mass customization made possible by digital manufacturing techniques. This I consider a rather well defined and stable approach, that does not need too much investigations, since it already has been the focus of a lot of research attention.
In the case of large-scale interventions, which have a significant time component as well - such as, for example, a masterplan envisioning the expansion of a city over the course of 20 years - how does one deliver the process?
We can simulate natural growth, influence and tweak it in such ways that avoid modernism’s rigidity. Nevertheless, in the exact moment that we freeze the respective process and translate its results into plans on paper that are subsequently going to be built by bulldozers and other concrete-squirting apparatus, we are effectively renouncing all the benefits derived from our insights in natural growth. We are effectively freezing the growth process, and by doing that, we are foregoing its adaptability, resilience, etc., all of which are intenisve qualities, intrinsic of the process itself, and not directly transmittable to the results of the frozen process.
So, my question is, how does the “representational” medium have to change in order to accommodate such new design techniques? What are the plans, sections, perspectives, diagrams of the process-as-a-masterplan?