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The interactive planning system YONA (Your Own Native Architect) was designed in 1973-1976 by the architect Yona Friedman, together with Nicolas Negroponte and Guy Weinzapfel of the MIT Architecture Machine Group (AMG). YONA was an innovative experiment in computer aided participatory design in the cognitive age (ABY – Architecture by Yourself). The project marks an important milestone in the history of computation architecture and human-machine interface evolution.
Yona Friedman was preoccupied with ideas concerning efficient housing and the democratization of architecture. The Flatwriter, conceptualized in his book Toward a Scientific Architecture (1970), is a computerized machine that allows users to actively participate in the planning of their dwellings. The machine’s theoretical intelligent system was supposed to integrate between design, execution and the end users in order to create an optimal structure. (Yiannoudes, 2016).
The 1960s saw a growing interest in computerbased architecture planning. YONA was a cybernetical experiment carried out in the framework of the large research project Machine Recognition and Inference Making in Computer Aided Design. The results of the YONA experiment were published in 1976 in a paper by Weinzapfel and Negroponte. The authors concluded by stating that “We see Architecture by Yourself as a worst-case exercise in man-machine interaction” (Negroponte and Weinzapfel, 1976).
This research examines the interrelationship between the Flatwriter and YONA by analyzing the historical background, interviewing key participants, and following its workflow to understand the synchronization. We acknowledge YONA’s pioneering role in human-machine interaction and information mechanisms. YONA and AMG planted the seeds of modern artificial intelligence and computer graphics common in our profession and related fields.
