Volume 30 · Number 4 · Summer 2013
The young and the inventive: Christina Cogdell
Christina Cogdell
(Photo: Gregory Urquiaga/UC Davis)
Christina Cogdell, associate professor of design and art history
Education: Ph.D., University of Texas, Austin, 2001; M.A., University of Notre Dame, 1994; B.A., University of Texas, Austin, 1991
Specialty: The impact of scientific theories on art, architecture and design
Christina Cogdell spends her time thinking about “self-organization” or “emergence” theory, an ambitious schemata used by an increasing number of architects, physicists, sociologists, biologists and others, that purports to explain how small systems organize into larger systems, and what sorts of implications follow from this principle. Using complex algorithms, one can, for example, generate models for how buildings relate to their surrounding environments, allowing architects to “grow” on their computers plausible designs that meet specific sets of criteria.
How, for example, do car drivers interact in complex traffic flows? How do individual buildings and streets mesh together into a functioning city environment? How do simple cells form together into complex, conscious living beings? And how do intelligent, self-conscious beings, their brains containing billions of neural connections, interact to form cultures and political communities or, less nobly, mobs?
All of this, argues Cogdell, is about understanding how order arises in large-scale systems — and identifying trends toward order against a backdrop that can frequently simply seem chaotic. “I see pragmatic benefits,” she said. “We’re having new ways of understanding as a result of the theory.”
More to the point, how do the individual parts of a larger system interact in the absence of central control hubs? After all, no one person or machine is sending out instructions to each individual driver on a busy freeway, yet most of the time people drive they do not crash. Similarly, nobody orders a group of people into a culture, yet, over time, people coalesce into communities with broadly shared values and behavioral patterns.
Understanding how the parts of a whole intersect may allow for an array of human-created networks, institutions and environments to be better designed to withstand shock, she believes.
And that’s where Cogdell is taking her ideas next. She is applying for a National Science Foundation grant to create a Graduate Complexity Consortium to study how this theory can be used across disciplines to design stronger systems. “We imagine a series of workshops where we’d invite experts in from different disciplines,” she explains. “It’d be a first. She said the consortium would be similar to other centers studying complex adaptive systems, but broader in scope. “They don’t deal with arts and humanities.”
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