Inaugurated on the occasion of the conference ACADIA 2010 LIFE in:formation, the exhibition Evolutive Means examines concepts, tools and technologies that implement responsive and generative aspects of information in the design process.

The exhibition design utilizes a computation procedure that crowdsources the ACADIA community to uncover patterns of information that can be used to generate knowledge about contemporary technological issues. The objective of this pioneering protocol is to index the position of contemporary architectural ideas and concepts in relation to peer-reviewed projects, guest projects and the larger ACADIA community. Given that the conference is an annual event, the discourse within the ACADIA community constantly shifts and evolves. Thus, one of the first goals relies on the assembly of a current body of work from the ACADIA community to create a database. The next step involves mining the database to uncover quantitative pattern formations. Analysis of those formations uncover relationships that generate key concepts that describe the discourse upon which individual projects in the exhibition can be compared. In addition, the curators established qualitative attributes of each project relative to the ideas of the overall conference.

In order to populate the exhibition layout, the compiled keyword list was anchored in the gallery space according to relationships specified by the curators. The intervention by the curator intentionally promotes curatorial critique through the exploration of possible relationships in a dynamic, fluid environment provided by the computational algorithm. Individual projects, however, are located based on their relationship to the keywords and other projects through a computational process of self-organization. The quantitative and qualitative keyword attributes provide the magnitude of the attraction and repulsion forces between the projects and the compiled keywords, determining the location of the individual projects in the gallery space as well as the attributes of the display volumes suspended from the ceiling.

The development of this tool to assist in curatorial design and facilitate in the tri-phase transition from data to information to knowledge uncovers patterns of ideas that are current and relevant to the international ACADIA community. The process of collecting, data-mining, and critically filtering ideas Crowdsourced from a wide-area community through both computational methods and human intervention provide a multi-dimensional comparison of ideas that indicate and form the current discourse.