Abstract

This chapter develops the concept of zootechnologies and of swarming as a cultural technique with regard to four decisive application areas. First, it discusses the development of drone swarms under the hypothesis that these create a multifold ‘spatial intelligence.’ Second, it highlights the importance of a variety of agent-based modeling toolkits for the dissemination of ‘swarm-intelligent’ applications throughout different scientific disciplines. Third, it investigates the impact of ‘swarm intelligence’ on the field of architectural design and urbanism and discusses attempts to conceptually exploit swarming for architectural theory. Finally, it turns towards the research field of crowd control where ABM ‘pre-mediates’ human crowd dynamics and turns traditional concepts of ‘the mass’ upside down.

Keywords: drone swarms, swarm architecture, agent-based modelling, swarm intelligence, crowd simulation, parametric design

Science has done all the easy tasks – the clean simple signals. Now all it can face is the noise; it must stare the messiness of life in the eye.

Researchers have good reasons to find swarm intelligence appealing: at a time when the world is becoming so complex that no single human being can understand it, when information (and not the lack of it) is threatening our lives, when software systems become so intractable that they can no longer be controlled, swarm intelligence offers an alternative way of designing ‘intelligent’ systems, in which autonomy, emergence, and distributed functioning replace control, preprogramming, and centralization.