Recasting computational design: a new modern agenda for a post-industrial, post-pandemic world.Mass production was the core technical logic of industrial modernity: for the last hundred years, architects and designers have tried to industrialize construction and standardize building materials and processes in the pursuit of economies of scale. But this epochal march of modernity is now over. In Beyond Digital, Mario Carpo reviews the long history of the computational mode of production, showing how the merger of robotic automation and artificial intelligence will stop and reverse the modernist quest for scale. Today's technologies already allow us to use nonstandard building materials as found, or as made, and assemble them in as many nonstandard, intelligent, adaptive ways as needed: the microfactories of our imminent future will be automated artisan shops.The post-industrial logic of computational manufacturing has been known and theorized for some time. By tracing its theoretical and technical sources, and reviewing the design theories that accompanied its rise, Carpo shows how the computational project, long under the sway of powerful antimodern ideologies, is now being recast by the urgency of the climate crisis, which has vindicated its premises-and by the global pandemic, which has tragically proven its viability. Looking at the work of a new generation of designers, technologists, and producers, Beyond Digital offers a new modern agenda for our post-industrial future.

1 Ways of Making 11.1 Hand-Making 41.2 Mechanical Machine-Making 61.3 Digital Making 121.4 Beyond the Anthropocene: A New Economy without Scale 161.5 The Collapse of the Modern Way of Making 201.6 The Teachings of the Pandemic 242 The Future of Automation: Designers Redesign Robotics 352.1 Florence, 1450: The Invention of Notational Work 392.2 America, 1909-1913: Notational Work Goes Mainstream 422.3 Taylor's Reinforced Concrete as a Social Project 472.4 The Automation of Notational Work 522.5 First Steps toward Post-Notational Automation 633 A Tale of Two Sciences, or The Rise of the Anti-Modern Science of Computation 793.1 The Two Sciences 823.2 Modern Architecture and Postmodern Complexity 933.3 Architects, Computers, and Computer Science 943.4 Degenerate Complexism and the Second Coming of AI 1123.5 The Limits of AI 2.0 1183.6 Machine Learning and the Automation of Imitation 1203.7 Sorry: There Won't Be a Third Digital Turn Driven by AI 1264 The Post-Human Chunkiness of Computational Automation 1294.1 Mechanical Assembly as the Style of Dissent 1324.2 Modernist Modularity, Postmodernist Collage, and Deconstructivist Aggregation 140Epilogue: Being Post-Digital 155Acknowledgments 163Notes 165Index 191