“Information technology gave us the platform to communicate with other disciplines. Working together in a data-driven process of collaborative design and collaborative engineering the stakeholders behave like birds in a swarm. They are like free particles, dynamically socializing in the Hive, exchanging information in the flow, developing a hive mind. They are the Swarm. All members of the Swarm are data-carriers in disguise. Every member is a node in the information flow network, in their own disguise, playing their specific role. But in the end it all comes down to exchanging data. The players are distributed beings, absorbing, processing and distributing data. All these data processing vehicles (yes, also people are vehicles, and as we will see later, buildings are vehicles too) operate in swarms, and all these swarms exchange information with other swarms. There are swarms on all social and physical levels and on all time-scales.”
“The Swarm
In the Swarm the designers exchange information with their clients, and with the other stakeholders in the process of building dreams. They exchange information with other disciplines in the collaborative design process, they work together with visual artists, composers, graphic designers, planners, publishers, broadcasters of information, and with other architects. They exchange information with construction engineers, installation engineers, project managers and process managers. And they want to establish feedback loops, because they want to learn from each other. They feed upon data from the other parties.”
Source: http://www.bk.tudelft.nl/en/about-faculty/departments/architectural-engineering-and-technology/organisation/hyperbody/research/theory/swarm-architecture-i/2003-swarm-architecture-i/