Welcome to 2011
Our built environment is the site where our incremental understanding of the world and natural phenomenon leads to techniques of creation and modals of construction; a site where our creative capacity in utilizing our tools and techniques manifest itself into a world we inhabit. In an era driven by our ambition for environmental reform and green design, then we have to question the capacity of our existing methods in helping us to achieve deeper insight into the properties of complex systems such as our built environment. Using simulation methods to study complex processes and interactions is fairly well positioned in the history of technological innovation. However, at this moment of history, the unforeseen behavior of our built environment is grabbing more forcefully our attention. The role of simulation either as a predictive model, providing us a slice of reality, or as a prescriptive model, allowing us to tweak and explore alternative realities, is already widely explored in physics, biology, economics and engineering. Simulation is also a “game changer” in how we will fundamentally rationalize and conceptualize the design of our built environment. The future availability of massive data simulated through a sea of distributed processors combined with the data collected from an instrumented environment are only few exemplary paradigms that will challenge our conventional assumptions about the built environment in the near future.
Moving forward, the key is to push our future developments beyond single-pointed technological solutions by conceiving complex causal relationships related to the architecture and methods of thinking and collaboration. Our future success is deeply rooted in our predisposition and capacity to shape an integrative thinking and approach towards the design of our built environment. Modern technological systems are so complex and interdisciplinary groups are needed to share perspective and information in order to create and control these systems.
Unlike other research conferences and symposia that merely provide a venue for publishing research on a particular topic, SimAUD will work to build a closer community for collaborative work and co-authoring of research that envisions the future of the built environment. Our incredibly diverse committee captures this very essence of SimAUD’s ambition for cross-pollinating domain knowledge and expertise. Within this context, I invite researchers in simulation, architecture, urban design and planning, HCI, ubicomp, infoviz, engineers, software developers, managers, educators, and business professionals who develop or use modeling, simulation, visualization, validation, or interaction techniques to submit original research work in one of the four submission categories.
Ramtin Attar
SimAUD 2011 Chair