Digital Darwinism: Mass Collaboration, Form-Finding, and The Dissolution of Authorship  --  Mario Carpo

Full Citation and Summary
Carpo, Mario. `Digital Darwinism: Mass Collaboration, Form-Finding, and The Dissolution of Authorship'. Log, no. 26, Fall 2012, pp. 97 - 105.


Written in the same year as his edited collection on the digital turn in architecture, this article engages issues of authorship and participation in architectural design. It argues that the participatory potential of digital tools, and their corollary anti-authorialism, has been rejected and redirected by architects in favour of authorial retrenchment. Carpo is a historian architecture whose research engages the influence of technology upon architectural thinking. 

Notes
- Carpo positions this article as a response to his own 2011 article entitled "Digital Style" that announced a dissolution of authorship in architecture, a "new digital "style of many hands"..." (pp. 97)
- Argues that the force of culture (Renaissance Humanism) at the base of architecture has overcome the force of technology in preserving individual authorship in architecture (pp. 98)
- "high added-value intellectual profession" which is an individual endeavour (pp. 98) 
- Architecture as "notational art" as per Alberti, drawing as the outcome of architectural practice (pp. 98) 
- This manifests as architects becoming "double author" insofar as they design the systems by which forms are "found" and then evaluate the outcomes of those systems (pp. 98-99)
- Bias is toward indeterminate systems which manifest formally and lean on "natural" models and not social ones [presumably since the simulation of natural systems can be designed] (pp. 99-100)
- Digital phenomenology -- digital craft in which the digital tool allows for the architect to take on the role of "craftsman" and become total author, both designer and constructor (pp. 101-102)
- Digital phenomenology --  digital simulation positioned as perfect re-enactment of real reality which vindicates the authorial intent of the architect (pp. 102-103) 
- Carpo sees this as a push-back against BIM as a manifestation of actual collaborative digitality which strips the architect of full authorial control as the "iterative feedback loop between designers and contractors transcends the traditional separation between conception and execution." (pp. 99) 
- Carpo presents a short case study from web design in, what he sees, as actual participatory design, "A/B Testing" in which two versions of a web interface are tested in the field. User activity is used as data for a minimax-like statistical calculation to decide which interface is the best [note how two things happen: authorship is partially retained, though bounded and free labour is extracted from web users through their activity]
- "...transparent political allegiances of todays digital phenomenology: a universe of forms where forms "just happen" is also a universe where, in the best Nietzschean tradition, the hero, magician, artist, or others, can and will capture, interpret, and perhaps tweak the spirit of nature  --  to the detriment of all others." (pp. 104)
- Carpo cautions against the approach to architecture which emerged as a retrenchment of authorship as embracing a eugenic mentality where individuals are arbiters and judges of what and who deserves to exist (pp. 104-105)