Good afternoon lyfk,
well, the book is out, but I’d be reluctant to buy it, because Robert Woodbury’s teaching is quite heavily centered on Bentley Systems, Inc. Generative Components which surely is a well working and exciting tool but maybe not so ideally suited for product designers. I’d be cautious when books come with marketing blurb as this “[…] Pushed by practices wanting and needing to produce novelty […]” and a content page as this “1. Introduction 2. What is Parametric Modeling? 3. How Designers Work 4. Programming 5. The New Elephant House, Copenhagen 6. Geometry 7. Onur Gun 8. Patterns for Parametric Design 9. Hysterical Space” where, in my opinion, Buro Happold’s and Foster + Partners’ tessellated British Museum Great Court roof would have been an example with a much higher architectonic quality. But, have a look at his teaching experience and especially the projects undertaken here School of Interactive Arts & Technology - Simon Fraser University to judge for yourself, if this is really a book you should invest in.
Baudrillard is a good reference because, apart from his texts on humans and their relation to the artificial, his writing is not clouding meaning with vainglorious meanderings as Deleuze, Lacan and other postmodernists who, for a while, posed as architecture and design critics. And, that is why Ostwald’s Ethics and the auto-generative design process is such a sobering and refreshing read…
ps: Some more (very) introductory literature on the topic:
Antonelli, P. (Ed.). (2008). Design and the elastic mind. New York, NY: The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Knauer, R. (2008). Transformation: Basic principles and methodology of design. Basel, Switzerland: Birkhäuser Verlag AG