Keeping Up With The Code - Communicating The Decision Making History Of Architectural Scripts

As the architecture industry engages computational methods to automate and optimise design processes, decision-making becomes embedded and hidden within complex code. Even where employees understand the procedure and logic of architectural scripts they may struggle to understand those developed by others and used on different projects. Accordingly, this paper outlines the research and development of a workflow to trace and document the decision-making history (DMH) of architectural scripts. This develops the relational database Huginn to test the feasibility of tracing decision-making history in scripting through a Python Web framework that sends data in a JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) format from Grasshopper. The research outcomes successfully demonstrate a system that can link a series of objects to their `decision' origins. This contributes to informing the development of theoretically-grounded coding protocols and simultaneously demystifying the complexity of architectural scripting and communicating the significance of data-augmented decision making within contemporary architectural design processes.