Episode Notes

Andrew Witt, associate professor at Harvard University and author of Formulations, on how mathematics and computational methods transform the way we think, design, and make art.

Andrew Witt is co-founder, with Tobias Nolte, of Certain Measures, a Boston/Berlin-based office for design futures and an Associate Professor in Practice of Architecture at Harvard University. Trained as both an architect and mathematician, he has a particular interest in a technically synthetic and logically rigorous approach to form. His work has been shown at the Centre Pompidou, Barbican Centre, Futurium, and Haus der Kulturen der Welt, among others. Connect with Andrew on LinkedIn and Certain Measures.

Favorite quotes

• “It’s not possible to do everything in an amazing way all at once. You have to cycle through those things. Different moments in life will create different opportunities.”
• “One of the consequences of mass media is that [it] creates intuitions around certain concepts through imagery.”
• "The only thing that really conveys human value to things is time.”
• “What remains after people are gone?”

Books

• Formulations by Andrew Witt
• Where Good Ideas Come From by Steven Johnson
• Synergetics by Buckminster Fuller

Links

• Andrew Witt
• Certain Measures
• Application public interface (API)
• The Black Box with Aziz Barbar
• Grasshopper & Dynamo
• Deep nostalgia and deepfakes
• DeFi and NFTs
• The adjacent possible is an idea introduced by Stuart Kauffman in 2002 and later used by Steven Johnson
• Log magazine edited by Cynthia Davidson
• A Machine Epistemology in Architecture by Andrew Witt
• MIT Press
• A Brief History & Ethos of the Digital Garden by Maggie Appleton
• HfG is Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design
• Institut Henri Poincaré is a mathematics research institute

People mentioned

• Alfred North Whitehead
• Charles Johnson - Matrix theorist
• Buckminster Fuller
• Steve Baer
• Bruno Latour
• Norbert Wiener
• Tobias Nolte
• Refik Anadol
• Satoru Sugihara
• William Huff
• Louis Kahn
• Ben Ferhman-Lee - Graphic designer
• Cynthia Davidson - Book series editor
• Sean Canty, Esther Choi, and Cameron Wu
• Aziz Barbar
• Henri Poincaré
• Peter Pierce
• Sanford Kwinter
• Paul Erdös

Chapters

• 00:00 · Introduction
• 01:22 · Mathematical design
• 06:53 · Gray boxing
• 09:28 · Black box algorithms
• 14:26 · Knowledge anxiety
• 20:47 · Collective authorship
• 22:04 · Adjacent possible
• 27:18 · The physical medium
• 30:13 · Triangulation and photogrammetry
• 33:40 · Voxel and pixel
• 37:52 · The role of the designer
• 41:10 · Formulations book
• 43:48 · Catalogs
• 48:56 · The eve of digitization
• 52:58 · Artificial intelligence
• 01:00:26 · Mass media
• 01:02:29 · Research methods
• 01:06:25 · Book publishing
• 01:15:10 · Writing
• 01:19:04 · Digital gardens
• 01:21:53 · Creative thinking
• 01:26:20 · Lecture preparation
• 01:30:20 · Erdös number
• 01:32:43 · Zines
• 01:39:54 · Consistency
• 01:41:08 · Time
• 01:43:18 · NFTs as value stores
• 01:48:44 · NFTs at Certain Measures
• 01:50:42 · The AI design critic
• 01:55:20 · Modern-day design collectives and influencers
• 01:58:38 · Advice for young people
• 02:01:08 · Money
• 02:03:35 · Collaboration and delegation
• 02:06:16 · Death
• 02:07:55 · Success
• 02:09:27 · Outro

I'd love to hear from you.

Submit a question about this or any previous episodes.

Join the Discord community. Meet other curious minds.

If you enjoy the show, would you please consider leaving a short review on Apple Podcasts/iTunes? It takes less than 60 seconds and really helps.

When you buy through links on Getting Simple, I may earn an affiliate commission.

Theme song Sleep by Steve Combs under CC BY 4.0.