Architectural Design Computing Program 
 

George Stiny, September 17, 2014

The Gestalt psychologist Wolfgang Köhler reviewed Norbert Wiener’s Cybernetics soon after it appeared in 1948. Köhler argued that machines and calculating lack insight. Warren McCulloch, Wiener’s fellow cyberneticist who used neurons to calculate, agreed: “the problem of insight, or intuition, or invention – call it what you will – we do not understand.” Today, this goes for objectoriented programming and design patterns, and foremost, for AI: “Insight remains handmade.” But embedding and recursion have been used in shape grammars since their start in 1972, to foster insight (seeing) in calculating with shapes, schemas, and rules. This turns calculating into painting, as it subsumes Alberti’s famous account of art and design in De Statua. Alberti’s landscapes (shapes) alter freely in an open-ended process that puts seeing first.

Urs Hirschberg, December 2008

Tahsin Demir and Burak Can, December 10, 2014

Kristoffer Jodefsson, April 2009

Milena Stavric, April 2012

Aser Gimenez Ortega, May 2012

Güvenç Özel (UCLA), January 2, 2014

David J. Gerber, January 2, 2014

Parametric Tendencies is just as it sounds, while every approach is not truly -mathematically- parametric the talk argues most digital approaches are in fact in consideration of associativity, constraints, objectives and coupling when applied to architectural design exploration. Furthermore these tendencies can be understood through two primary motivations; one to support more expansive solution space thinking and; two to support more intelligent form finding and or performance. In essence, to design is to synthesize through a design exploration process and therefore at issue perhaps is ones ability to harness the capability and equally to manage that of design problem complexity.

Dr. Gerber will present a contemporary taxonomy of digital design techniques and tools and the kinds of affordances brought to architectural designers and their projects. Included in the talk is the works' relationship to the formulation of "Parametricism" and more importantly aspects of correlation, articulation, organization, and design ideation and the trending and tendencies of Design Agencies for a post Fordist global society.

Sigrid Brell Çokcan, June 26, 2013

Industrial robots – or robotic arms – are highly complex kinematic machines with six or more axes that, similar to a human arm, can be equipped with different tools. This multifunctionality along with their many degrees of freedom enables robotic arms to perform tasks that go far beyond the scope of regular CNC machines or CAD-CAM processes. Especially the creative industry is interested in such machines, as it enables the fabrication of new geometries as well as the implementation of new fabrication processes. However, most software for programming robotic arms is aimed at facilitating mass production, while the creative industry requires new and flexible solutions that enable customized fabrication in smaller numbers.