If technology, as Larry Hickman claims, is more than technique because it involves cognitive inferential activity, could it be argued that the computational transformation of design brings forward new intelligent activities generated through and within the means of automated processing? In the 1990s, digital modelling involved the application of non-standard geometry and complex mathematical functions to design curvilinear structures. Here the thinking activities of machines were relegated to experiments with binary logic with differential calculus. Since the early 2000s, however, technological design has rather shifted towards a re-materialisation or naturalisation of the digital forms evolving on the other side of the screen. The future of automated design, as envisioned in the exhibition ‘Radical Atoms’ presented by the Tangible Media Group (MIT) at the 2016 Ars Electronica Festival, involves a naturalisation in the interconnection of bits and atoms where smart materials are modelled upon the intelligence of natural substances. However, as the interface of digital modelling and material structures concerns the design of immersive environments by replacing the filmic filter of the interface with the concreteness of intelligent atoms, no longer can the binary logic of the digital impose a form on physical matter. Even with the early use of CAD in digital design there was already the realisation that the differential calculus, as a non-standard mathematical model, was rather attuned to the intelligent dynamics of matter rather than any formal language insofar as it exposed design to evolutionary continuity between the given and the constructed. In the last fifteen years, as architectural design has been concerned with a generic function of computation, involving a new synthesis of calculation and statistics, quantification and prediction, measure and hypothesis, it has become even more apparent that the structural behaviour of increasingly smaller parts has become central to new forms of spatio-temporal becoming.

As opposed to the function of the differential calculus establishing a meta-equivalence between two distinct realms – the digital and the material – the new focus on the general function of computation has rather decomposed distinct scales into granular data and their common behaviour. This means that computational design can account not only for the local behaviour of molecular matter but also for how its spatio- temporal evolution can be understood in terms of computational functions of organisation and structuring.