Courses

#GSD6338 is an introductory course on Computational Design, with particular focus on architecture, landscape, and urbanism.

In this course, we will understand “Computational Design” as the set of methods borrowed from fields such as computer science, mathematics and geometry, applied to solving design problems. Chances are that a significant portion of your typical design workflow is mediated by digital tools and, in particular, computer software that has been designed and created by a third party, and therefore, your creativity is partially biased by someone else’s opinions. However, the real craftsman is the one who understand their tools so well that they can change, improve and adapt them to their own desires. In this course, you will learn how to think algorithmically, and how to understand and create computer software, so that you will be able to explore new creative opportunities and relate them to your personal interests.

The course will offer student the possibility of becoming familiar with the process of programming in a creative context, as the power of computational media will be revealed through examination of code and data as a medium for creative expression.

Enactive Design is an advanced research seminar on human-computer interaction. We will explore the role of real-time, bidirectional communication between human and digital agents in a design context, and leverage the potentials of this interactive relationship to establish new creative domains.

Digital interfaces provide computational frameworks for creative exploration in disciplines such as architecture, design and art. However, in many instances such as traditional computer-aided design software, integrated development environments, numerically-controlled fabrication machines, or certain kinds of robots and artificial intelligence systems, the machine is subservient to the orders of its human counterpart. While this model might be a convenient human-machine relationship for production-oriented scenarios, in the case of design environments, a higher degree of machine agency could be desired, as it may generate new models of ideation, creative exploration and design through human-computer collaboration.

Our investigation is inspired by the concept of Enactivism, a philosophy which argues that cognition arises from the interactions of an agent with its context. Rather than in an abstract or intangible way, knowledge and learning in agents arise from purposeful, situated and embodied interaction with their context. Translated to design environments, what would it mean to create with tools that have a certain degree of agency of their own? How would that inform and expand our creativity? What kind of opportunities may arise from designing as a conversation rather than an imposition? Can design be conceived as the human curation of the suggestions of an artificial intelligence? How can the power and precision of computation be amplified by the decision-making capacity of humans-on-the-loop? Are these new forms of collaborative art?

We will address these questions, and many others, through the design of concurrent human-machine interactive platforms, with a particular focus on the computational aspects of the system. Participants will learn techniques such as applied artificial intelligence, network communication, asynchronous programming and RESTful APIs, and additional topics such as physical sensing, interactive fabrication and robot control will be discussed. The course will rely heavily on the use of state of the art, off-the-shelf generative AI models, including large language models, diffusion models, etc. (i.e. no foundational machine learning topics will be covered). Students are expected to use these tools to build prototype applications as demonstrators of their design questions.

The course will be conducted through a series of lectures, readings, discussions and hands-on workshops. Exercises will experiment with real-time communication between human and digital agents, leading to a semester-long personal/group final project and a conference-grade research paper. This is an advanced research seminar: a high degree of maturity, independence and initiative are expected.

This course is the last installment of a three-part course series on Computational Design preceded by SCI- 6338: Introduction to Computational Design (Fall), and SCI-6483: Procedural Fields, Functional Design of Discrete Hyperdimensional Spaces (Spring), taught by the same instructor.

This project- and discussion-based seminar offers a deep, critical inspection of contemporary design practices, research methods, and discourses informed by Neuroscience, Behavioral Psychology, Human-Computer Interaction, and Philosophy of the Mind. In recent years, theories about extended cognition, embodied interaction, and affective computing, combined with physiological data collection techniques such as eye-tracking, electroencephalography, and electrodermal activity, among others, have given rise to new questions about the foundations of design. Crucially, these methods and frameworks have allowed design practitioners and scholars to ask disciplinary questions with a new degree of rigor, supported by empirical evidence. How are cities and landscapes perceived by their users? How do materials impact the affective states of building inhabitants? How do digital user interfaces affect user behavior? How do designers think when they design? These and other puzzles have begun to be scrutinized under a new light.

While acknowledging the role that contributions from these fields play today in our understanding of the built environment (as an experience) and design (as a practice), this course argues that a rigorous and systematic assessment of their applicability, value, and potential in design research is needed. What aspects of the built environment can these fields’ methods and theories help us understand better? How relevant is their potential to change the ways we conceptualize and operationalize design practice? What methods are available to understand the degree to which there might be a scientific basis for design?

In this course, students will work in groups of two on a design-related topic of their choice –design will be understood in the broadest sense, including digital and physical designs across all scales– and will empirically explore it through the semester using one or more methods of their choice, including eye-tracking, electroencephalography (EEG), electrodermal activity (EDA), and questionnaires. Students interested in the course are encouraged to reach out to the instructor with questions about the class.

Digital design and fabrication technologies have become integral to contemporary design and architectural practice discourse. The translation from design to realization is mediated by a range of tools and processes whose development is informed over time by material properties, skill, technology, and culture. As a whole, these systems are the vehicle by which design teams, manufacturers, installers, and, ultimately, users engage the materiality of architecture and design. Parallel technological developments relating to the way in which things are designed (digital modeling, simulation, generative design, AI, etc.) and the way things are made (automation, computer-controlled equipment including robotics, advanced materials, etc.) have afforded new opportunities and challenges related to the realization of new forms in architecture, part customization, user-centered design, and enhanced building performance.

Within this context, this course will explore the materialization of design as both a technical and a creative endeavor. Special attention will be given to the interplay between digital information and physical artifacts, the opportunities and shortcomings of those translations, and the impact these technologies and outcomes may have on society. Beyond technology for the sake of technology, the course will explore how climate change, destabilized supply chains, and material life cycle considerations have begun to challenge our reliance on singular global material flows in favor of increasingly distributed systems. Further, the course will focus on how design-related disciplines might leverage advanced design-to-make workflows in areas where population growth coincides with significant resource limitations and the development of local capacity is critical.  

Through lectures, hands-on workshops, and making-centric assignments, students will engage with a range of methods and materials that underpin a foundation in digital fabrication. Guest lectures will highlight how digital technologies are impacting the construction and manufacturing industries across scales and contexts. Through early assignments and a term project, the course is designed to provide hands-on experience with the digital fabrication equipment available in the GSD Fabrication Lab — including CNC mills, 3D printers, and industrial robotic arms — and is suited for novices and experts across all disciplines.

This course is an interdisciplinary platform for designers, engineers, and scientists to interact and develop innovative new products. The course introduces ideas-to-innovation processes in a hands-on, project/product-focused manner that balances design and engineering concepts with promising, real-world opportunities. Switching back and forth between guided discovery and focused development, between bottom-up and top-down thinking, and market analyses, the course helps students establish generalizable frameworks as researchers and innovators with a focus on new and emerging technologies.

Digital modeling techniques are at the core of most modern creative workflows in visual media, such as static 2D images, video animations, 3D models and digital fabrication. For instance, most prevailing paradigms in CAD modeling are based on the explicit definition of geometrical entities in model space (location and size of 2D shapes, vertices of a mesh, control points of NURBS objects) and their manipulation through constructive modeling operators (extrude, revolve, sweep or boolean operations, to name a few). However useful, such paradigms are often very limited for advanced creation/manipulation of digital models, such as those with high degrees of formal complexity (failed boolean intersections, complex infill patterns in 3D prints) or simply incapable of representing certain kinds of realities (models with non-binary gradients between inside and outside).

In parallel, the field of computer graphics has developed a plethora of techniques designed to generate, visualize and process images displayed on a 2D screen. Many of these methods involve the implicit definition of the rules governing visualization pipelines, expressed as functional representations of the characteristic values in a field of discrete entities. Traditionally, this has translated into the problem of computing the RGB values of each pixel in a digital screen. However, modern applications of these techniques have been extended in multiple dimensions to, for example, generate procedural animated graphics, analyze and process video, perform computational fluid dynamics, voxel-based world generation for video games, or multi-material 3D printing.

In this course, you will learn techniques for the procedural generation of discrete multidimensional spaces, such as 2D images, video, voxelized fields or any extension thereof. We will cover topics such as color theory, image processing, functional modeling, shaders and raytracing techniques. The content of the class will be predominantly technical, and taught through a combination of high-level lectures and hands-on technical workshops. Students are expected to complement the class learning with online materials guided by the instructor. Demonstrated experience in computer programming, such as SCI-6338, CS50 or similar, is a pre-requisite for this class. Student work will consist of guided tutorials and course assignments, culminating with a personal final project of the student’s choice.

This course is the second installment of a three-part course series on Computational Design preceded by SCI-6338: Introduction to Computational Design (Fall), and continued by SCI-6365: Enactive Design, Creative Applications Through Concurrent Human-Machine Interaction (Fall) taught by the same instructor.

Rapid global climate change has lent new urgency to our longstanding interest of growing materials to break the unstainable reality of material extraction, use and landfill. Today’s new buildings can be designed and built to operate without using fossil fuels, without emitting CO2 into the atmosphere, but their construction threatens to remain a growing source of carbon emissions. Can biological materials provide the answer? This seminar will explore biologically derived material systems ranging from plants and plant fibers to fungi, bacteria and other microorganisms. Our focus will be on buildings and consumer products, with consideration of the larger landscape and geographical scale. Through in-class lectures, case studies, and hands-on workshops, students will be exposed to some of the new biomaterials that are being developed at the intersection of material science, biology, and design. Other lectures will trace the impact of these material systems on the climate, explore the landscapes of production and their ecologies. The seminar will explore the embodied impacts of our material world and take a critical look at the production of bio-based materials and their geochemical flows. Students will explore various ways of fabricating prototypes with these biomaterials, seeking to understand how new regimes of real-time sensing may be overlaid onto these methods to gain new insights into the material. Students will be required to develop a term project of their choosing in teams relating to issues raised in the course at any scale – be it new material development, new fabrication processes, the design of a circular material economy, or an investigation into landscapes of production. Students from all GSD departments as well as from across the University are encouraged to enroll.