Prototyping the System Model

Up until this point, the systems that were developed in Chapters 2.3 and 2.4 are still theoretical concepts of how behavioral patterns might be translated into machine logic and how that might interact with coded infrastructure. Now that all the major components of this methodology have been considered and developed, we can begin the technical exercise of coding these concepts within a simulation system to prototype and assess the validity of this approach.

At this stage of prototyping, we can utilize Integrated Development Environments (IDEs), which are software applications that facilitate the development of software.[1] These programs generally include various tools built on top of a text-based source code editor to help maximize programmer productivity.[2] While there are many forms of IDEs with various degrees of technicality and flexibility, the Java-based IDE processing has been chosen for this prototype, due to its familiarity (since I have already used this software in previous elective courses) and its visual user interface (which better facilitates my learning process of computer programming). Because of these aspects, I can both assess the validity of these human systems to see if they work in practice as well as in principle while I familiarize myself with the fundamentals of computer programming, which will be an invaluable skill moving forward with the creation of this framework tool and in life.

Within the earlier chapters (2.3 & 2.4) we broke down the simulation into the autonomous human agents and static/dynamic architectural elements, where they can be further classified as different objects within the system. In computer science, this concept is known as object-oriented programming (OOP), where the code is organized based on defining individual objects to interact with each other within the system. As already suggested by the autonomous agents defined in Chapter 2.3: Abstracting the Human Systems, and the methodology specified in Chapter 2.4: Spatial Functions, these objects themselves can contain attributes in the form of variables that can be modified by functions in the form of procedures.[3] Following this approach then allows the objects to effectively represent real life entities, which in turn allows us to simulate a variety of entities ranging from fluid particles to autonomous human agents to both static and dynamic architectural elements, making this a highly appropriate method for prototyping such a simulation.

While this prototype can be somewhat crude, it shows that the concept of these human systems is able to produce results somewhat resembling humans moving through the space, which demonstrates that there is merit in this methodology of simulating complex human crowds by these simple systems. (Fig. 2.5.1 - 2)