Digital Pedagogies in Design Education, 27 th –28 th March 2024, RV University School of Design & Innovation 1 Making Grammars: A Situated & Embodied Framework for Design Computation Ayodh Vasant Kamath * * Kamath Design Studio Abstract- This paper argues that currently available generative AI tools for design extend a long history of hylomorphic ideas that have defined the discipline of architecture since its inception in Classical Greece. The limitations of these AI tools in relating to the material world are correlated to the limitations of a hylomorphic design process in relating to the physical environment. Answering calls for an alternative theoretical framework to overcome these limitations, the paper proposes making grammars as one potential alternative. Applications of making grammars in pedagogy and research are discussed to illustrate its utility. Key words- making grammars, machine learning, hylomorphism. Background What is Hylomorphism Architects do not construct buildings but draw designs for them. Drawing involves the manipulation of abstract shapes, not materials in the environment. The anthropologist and archaeologist Tim Ingold (2013) characterizes this gap between design and the environment as arising from a hylomorphic worldview. Hylomorphism, in the words of the architecture and energy researcher Kiel Moe, refers to the processes by which “forms are determined independent of and a priori to matter-energy” (Moe, 2016, p. 1300). Ingold describes hylomorphism as the process by which “practitioners impose forms internal to the mind upon a material world” (Ingold, 2013, p. 21). Hylomorphism thus forms “our conceptual and epistemological model for how we relate to nature” (Moe, 2016, p. 1300). The spread of hylomorphism as a way of thinking that spans periods in history and places in the world, from Classical Greece to today’s globalized planet, is identified by these authors as an obstacle in understanding our relationship with the environment as it limits the conception of the environment to something that is passive and separate to the designer. A Fragmentary History of Hylomorphism: From Aristotle to AI Through a meticulous reading of pre-classical and classical Greek and Roman texts, the art and architectural historian Indra Kagis McEwen (1993) traces the origin of the word episteme to the revelatory experience of creating something well-made by carefully shaping and fitting together its components. McEwen (1993) explains, however, that by classical Greek times this materially engaged and emergent notion of knowledge creation was replaced by an immutable concept of knowledge premised on the experience of viewing a well-crafted, but extant and static, artifact. This change in the meaning of episteme brought about by devaluing material engagement and by viewing matter as inert, McEwen argues, went hand-in-hand with craftspersons losing political power in Greece, and has since remained a feature of Western thought in the notion of hylomorphism. The emergence of a hylomorphic worldview in Classical Greece can therefore be characterized as the marginalization of knowledge obtained from material engagement in favour of knowledge obtained from the passive observation of artifacts.