David Castro taking a shot at an awesome courtship swarm of Bigeye fish at Cabo Pulmo, Baja California Sur, Mexico. Caption provided by Octavio Aburto (via National Geographic Photo Contest 2012) A critical analysis of the book Swarm Intellignece – Neil Leach, Roland Snooks What to underline The bee builds the next cell starting on the corner of other cells, wich are already have two walls built. This simplicity protects the natural growth of the hive,  the contuniuty is necessary for success. M?croscale generates simple inputs, wich collectively form the whole. As the organism gets bigger, the possibility to bring the whole information at any given moment to every individual becomes impossible. The set of simple rules and tracable information patterns allow the individual to make decisions. Ant body collectors are not able to sit on a desk and decide how many dead bodies should be carried in wich direction, they just follow little patterns and the job is done. Relationship between a human and the city, a bee and an orchid, an ant and the colony, differ on many levels on scale and purpose. One thing that remains obvious is these relationships are consisting of feedback loops. The city gives inputs to the individuals and the individuals shape the city by their inputs. This mutual interaction is the key to growth and stabilitiy of the whole. A city grows on its small scale economic and behavioral rules of the neighbours. “The whole is greater than the sum” , the mathematical addition of all entries create a statistic, but if the input of “interaction” is added creating the “whole” as a system including the intelligence. It is like the soul of the whole. Individuals are “stupid” and the whole has a intelligence. It is not possible to say, one neuron is intelligent, but the whole organism can generate intelligence on extremely complex levels. To generate an understandable model and usable in architecture, our tools are visualisation and computational techniques. Data collection in microscale inputs is the key, that is what we can extract from the book. Instead of designing a whole, architects need to design  a system, wich can interact, evolve and update himself. The idea of having huge monumental buildings “perfect” as they are is going to be romantic and historic. Now the building, the city, the neighbourhood should be respectfull to the user, interact and collect data from the user, at any time. Generate solutions at the system to those issues wich can be solved by design. Respect and democracy found in nature should be coming back to the output of architecture. The City.   The swarm intelligence exeggerated: