Diagrams as Logical Machines. Informing the Design Process Through Permutation

The morphological school of Italian tradition, developed in the 1960s, is grounded on the investigation of the urban environment and architectural form. It reconstructs the contemporary environment’s configuration as a historical process derived from a previous structure through maps and typology. From a broader perspective, the process mentioned is similar to an evolutionary process in which some elements change at different times with a logic that can be different in each part of the globe but can be understood thanks to a logical tool. Despite criticisms of the urban morphology approach and its aim to predict a specific urban environment based on evolutionary recurrences, looking at the city as composed of permutations encourages the possibility of defining new scenarios for the city and the project. This shift in reading the city led to a significant change in the study of urban form, pivoting the tool from maps to diagrams. That is why the diagrammatic logic may directly connect the reading of the urban environment with the design process. Indeed, the iteration with software, especially when it allows to show dynamicity, has expanded the range of outputs. It provides a diagram that is neither entirely mental nor purely iconic, which can be manipulated to produce other diagrams and urban configurations. Maps translated into diagrams can be used as a starting point for computational design thinking activities. The innovation from informing the design process through the permutations extracted from the diagram became the driving force for new projects. Informing the design process through permutation means searching for a way to interpret the process of transformation of the city. For this reason, the paper focuses on the potential of the diagram as a machine built using a logical process that can lead to reading the city logically but focusing on its exceptions without fixing a specific rule of transformation. Moreover, the expected result is to open a debate on methodology that directly links the analysis with the urban design.