In his musicolour machine Gordon Pask observes the creative process emerging through human machine collaboration. The musicolour machine is a system that trains an intelligent machine by the musician’s interaction with the piano. The machine analyses the patterns in the composition and reacts to these by outputting colored lights. The recurrent interaction created by such a feedback loop pushes the composer to change the composition in order to control the light patterns while machine continuously changes the output by reacting to the changes in the composition. In this case the art piece emerges through the interaction of this two distinct intelligences, none of them having a single authorship on the final piece.

Here the question becomes how one can follow a design strategy that is co-created with participation of a non-human co-author. In this case we can state that design becomes an interactive process where two different kind of intelligences react on each other setting the artefact in a continuous flux. The distinction between the both authors liberates the design from archetypes and opens new ways to novel solutions for classic design problems.
In the age of climate change and its accompanied metabolic shift, we need to think design as a joint venture with natural resources. As OpenFields we are approaching design as a thermodynamic process, that is always in the state of becoming through the influx, removal or redirection of energy.

As Howard T.Odum states: “In its structure and function, nature consists of animals, plants, microorganisms, and human societies. These living parts are in turn joined by invisible pathways over which pass chemical materials that cycle round, and round being used and reused, and over which flow potential energies that cannot be reused. The network of these pathways forms an organized system from parts. … A study of nature and man is thus a study of systems.”[2]

In our practice we situate ourselves as architects of systems and aim to design micro ecologies, metabolic processes, open systems that evolve through their interaction with their environment, which can be virtual as well as physical.

Working in the intersection between biology, ecology, computer science and design, we believe that the innovation only can happen through an interdisciplinary understanding of our world in different layers and flows of information. We pursue research to understand the underlying principles in the ecologies we inhabit; analyze simulate and prototype to develop solutions that are efficiently responding to their context.
We believe that architecture is an act of formation, therefore we aim to develop open systems that can evolve in interaction with their environment beyond our control.