One afternoon in the summer of 2019, I was cooking at home. I was going to make Ma Po Tofu - a famous Chinese household dish. When all the preparations were about to be ready, I suddenly realized that I was out of vinegar in the kitchen, which is an essential seasoning. As I was worrying about this, it occurred to me that I might be able to use tomatoes to replace the sourness in the vinegar, and I still had some tomatoes at home. So, I tried this new way to make Ma Po Tofu. As it turned out, it actually tasted really good! The fresh flavor and vibrant color from the tomatoes made a nice improvement to this famous dish.

There are many famous Chinese dishes are made by – “accident.” Sometimes it is because the lack of something in the recipe, so the chef chooses a substitute, based on available ingredients in the kitchen, and thus “accidentally” creating a new recipe like no others before. This human “intelligence” is amazing, isn’t it? We can optimize the combinations to the available ingredients, while not deviating too much from the goal set at the beginning - like the example of my Ma Po Tofu, I still got what I wanted.

However, the long-standing industrial production always tend to obliterate the individuality of materials and make everything in the same ways. For example, logs are often broken into pieces and made into standard plywood panels.

Driven by this experience, I want to try to create a new way of design and construction, that is, write an algorithm for a computer, give it the ability to self-study the properties of a certain material (even maybe some “unusable” material). Then we input a guiding form, give it some raw materials and let it generate a suitable design according to the existing material conditions.

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