Procedural Fields: Functional Design of Discrete Hyperdimensional Spaces

This course will introduce participants to computational methods for the generation of discrete multi-dimensional media, using functional definitions.

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.

Informal Robotics

This course teaches how to create original robotic devices made of light, compliant – informal – materials.

New fabrication techniques are transforming the field of robotics. Rather than rigid parts connected by mechanical connectors, robots can now be made of folded paper, carbon laminates or soft gels. They can be formed fully integrated from a 3D printer rather than assembled from individual components. Informal Robotics draws on cutting-edge research from leading labs, in particular, Harvard’s Micro Robotics Laboratory which has created unique designs for ambulatory and flying robots, end-effectors, medical instruments and other applications.

We will explore informal robotics from multiple perspectives, culminating with the design of original devices displaying animated intelligence in real-time. Going beyond traditional engineering approaches, we will also explore new opportunities for design at the product, architectural, and urban scales.

Techniques:
Hands-on:  Working with the GSD’s Fab Lab we are creating a kit of parts that will be available to all enrolled students. With the kit, you can create a wide range of folding mechanisms controlled by on-board miniature electronics.
Software / Simulation: Software workshops will be offered on Fusion 360 and Grasshopper to simulate robotic performance within a virtual environment.

Topics:
– Kinematics: design techniques for pop-ups, origami, and soft mechanisms.
– Fabrication: methods: for composite materials, laminated assembly, self-folding, and integrated flexures – the kit of parts will allow for hands-on exploration.
– Controls: how to actuate movement and program desired behavior. Topics include servos, linear actuators, and use of Arduino actuator control.
– Applications: takes us beyond purely technological concerns, contextualizing Informal Robotics within larger trends where materials, manufacturing and computation are starting to merge

Towards a New Science of Design?

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.

Plants and Placemaking – New Ecologies for a Rapidly Changing World

In the face of crises spanning pandemics, political turmoil, and the rapid degradation of the planet’s natural systems—all within a backdrop of myriad inequalities—the power of plants in shaping human experience has been proven. Erosive pressures associated with changes to climate have placed global ecologies and plant communities under assault, yet abundant and resilient life still adapts and flourishes in most places. This course will encourage students to observe these patterns and to learn from context so that we can place the healing and restorative qualities of plants, essential to sustaining life on this planet, in the foreground of our work as landscape architects.

To reimagine the revegetation of a place after catastrophe or amidst the pressures of development and the complexities of human movement, we must first understand context by digging into the past to examine what ecologies were there before the present state occurred. With these informed perspectives, we can begin to repair fragmented natural systems, preserve (and create) habitat, sequester carbon, and buffer communities from destructive weather and climate—all while embracing the realities of how people gather, work, and live. Plants define the character of place; they shape who we are and who we become. We must get this right or the same patterns in more chaotic contexts will simply reemerge.

This course is open to those who crave a creative and interpretive, yet pragmatic, approach toward utilizing plants to create landscapes that actively rebuild systems stretching far beyond site boundaries. Expressive and iterative weekly exercises will encourage rapid design that inspires students to explore natural and designed plant communities. Conventional and non-conventional planting typologies will be examined.

Together we will seek new and innovative ideas for how to restore biological function to the land. This course will not be a comprehensive botanical overview of the history of plants; however, it will reinforce important methodologies for how to learn and research plants that can be translated to any locale, by studying individual vegetative features and characteristics. We will translate these investigations into design languages that can be applied in future design work.

Healthy Buildings

The way we design and operate buildings plays a central role in our health, due to both the time we spend indoors and the climate impact of the energy used to power our buildings. This course, cross-listed between Harvard Graduate School of Design and Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health, seeks to leverage the science and approaches from each discipline to find building-related solutions to the public health challenges of our time. Students will explore building strategies that can improve indoor air quality, help prevent the spread of airborne infectious disease, reduce exposure to toxic materials, improve thermal resilience, and support overall well-being, while also examining the role buildings play in our energy system, the cascading health impacts of associated air pollution and climate change, and building design and technologies that can support climate mitigation, climate adaptation, and climate resilience. Through a mix of lectures, case studies, hands-on workshops, real-world building assessments, and a final project pairing students from each school, students will engage deeply in a solutions-focused course at the intersection of public health, environmental health, architecture, and design.

This course is jointly offered by HSPH as EH 252 and the GSD as SCI 6361. It will meet for the first half of the semester, January 30–March 6, at HSPH and the second half, March 13-April 24, at the GSD. See syllabus for details.   

Digital Material Systems: Ceramics

Digital design and fabrication technologies have become integral to the discourse surrounding contemporary design and architectural practice. 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. Parallel technological developments relating to the way in which things are designed (digital modeling, simulation, generative design, 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 year’s course positions ceramic material systems as a vehicle for exploring applied research methodologies and investigation into the opportunities (and challenges) afforded by digital fabrication techniques. Building on a long-term collaboration with the Harvard Ceramics Studio in Allston, this course will advance strategies for robotics, additive manufacturing, and other computational fabrication technologies.

Ceramics are the first material created by humankind and are produced across scales and applications from the craft-studio to high-volume, automated manufacturing environments. Pleasing to the touch and easily manipulated by hand, it can also be subject to digital technologies and robotic approaches. While ceramic-specific aspects of material design and manipulation will be taught, the emphasis is on understanding ceramics as a microcosm of material research that offers insights which transfer to work with almost any material used in architecture.

Ecologies, Techniques, Technologies IV

GSD 6242 is the final course in the Ecologies, Techniques and Technologies landscape core sequence. It is a required course for all MLA I, and MLA I AP students. The class introduces the concept of the poetics of a material landscape architecture. Each class participant will learn and develop skill in traditional, current and emerging practices of landscape making.

The learning objectives of this class are:
1. Develop skill in the use of the Diagnostic Section and Constructive Drawing as instruments of analytic observation of existing built landscapes and in the design conception, development, and documentation of material landscape propositions.

2. Develop skill in the application of the judgment of the senses to landscape making:
   2.1 The Differentiation of Size, Scale and Proportion
   2.2 The Application of Surface Refinements, Surface Diversity, and the Trace of the Hand

3. Understand that design proposes and workmanship disposes and that this dialectic is central to the making of a work of landscape architecture.

4. Know how and why to select a palette of landscape construction materials for a project. A material selection based on:
   4.1 Technical Performance
   4.2 Aesthetic/Symbolic/Emotional Response
   4.3 Environmental Performance
   4.4 Regulatory Mandate
   4.5 Economy – Measured as the Expenditure of Energy Over Time

5. Understanding the environmental and social implications of how “raw” materials are sourced and processed into “building” materials.

6. Develop skill in the design application of techniques of shaping materials for landscape construction:
   6.1 Wasting
   6.2 Forming
   6.3 Casting
   6.4 Depositing

7. Develop skill in the joining of materials as the source of detail design languages of landscape architecture.

8. Understand the logic of and develop skill in the design documentation of a work of landscape architecture.

Cases in Contemporary Construction

As the final component in the required sequence of technology courses, this professionally-oriented course develops an integral understanding of the design and construction of buildings and their related technologies: structural, constructional, and environmental. Building on fundamentals covered in GSD 6123: Construction Systems, the course looks in detail at examples of innovative construction techniques in wood, steel, and concrete structures. Building design and construction will be evaluated within the context in which technological innovation takes place by exploring the relationship of the principal project participants, such as designers, contractors, building product manufacturers, and the owner(s). On this, the course will introduce the fundamentals of managing design and construction projects as well as the principal project delivery methods and scheduling techniques. Aspects such as risk management and environmental and social impacts on projects will be introduced, as well as topics related to facilitating innovation and developing talent.

Class meetings concentrate on case studies of recent buildings, which students are expected to study prior to class meetings. Each main course theme will be introduced by a lecture, and certain cases may have participants from the project team as guest speakers. Detail drawings as well as issues of project and construction management are introduced for discussion. Computer applications on structures, construction, environmental control systems, and techniques and decision-making frameworks on managing projects and teams are an integral part of the course.

Prerequisites: GSD 6123, 6125, and 6229, or equivalent.

Ecologies, Techniques, Technologies II

This course is required for all first-year MLA I and MLA I AP students.

Topography is one of the primary and most powerful elements of landscape architecture, forming a foundation for plant growth, habitat, the flow of water and energy, and human experience. This course is dedicated to developing students’ facility in reading the land and manipulating topography and water flow through a variety of representational tools with a focus on plan drawings of contours, slopes and spot elevations, models, and section drawings. Students will learn techniques that cumulatively build toward an ability to resolve difficult grading problems with many layers of complexity.

The course begins with reading the land and understanding the relationship between the ground surface and water flow. Topics move on to geomorphology; the process of grading and contour manipulation; the conventions of grading representation, terminology and communication in the construction industry; as well as accessibility codes. The second part of the course focuses on water quality and quantity, introducing techniques used to calculate the amount of water flowing over a site and the various ways that the topography can be manipulated to slow, convey, filter, collect or disperse water to help improve its quality and control water flow emanating from a range of storm events. The case studies and precedents presented throughout the course help to illustrate a broad range of approaches to problem solving and the act of sculpting the land.
 

This course focuses on the agency of landform and water flow in the creation and design of landscape. At the end of the course, students will be able to manipulate contours toward a given intention and will understand the factors that contribute to stormwater volumes and flows and ways to embrace and incorporate those factors toward a desired design intent. 
 
During this course, students will learn to:
– Read the land and water, manipulate contours and become familiar with conventions for drawing and communicating intents
– Design topography for human experience
– Collect and clean stormwater
– Support living systems.

The course is taught as a series of lectures and individual, short-term exercises that focus on core competencies, and one longer-term design exercise.  Live lectures will be supplemented with asynchronous resources such as pre-recorded lectures, recordings of select class lectures, and written primers. Instructors anticipate that some shifts may be required during the term to respond to yearly shifts in student needs.
 

Each week will typically include two class sessions of 1.25 hours each (2.5 hrs total), consisting of one lecture session attended by all students, and one ‘section’ session dedicated to a smaller group of students. Section sessions typically will be dedicated toward questions and deeper dives into the ongoing assignments, and some time to work on assignments. MLA I and AP students will be divided equally into each section. Assignments will require additional time outside of class. Assignment deadlines are focused on the first half of term, and sections toward the end of term are more focused on lectures and visiting lecturers.

Prerequisites: Experience drafting 2-dimensional plan and section drawings to scale in Autocad or Rhino.

Materials

This course explores the science and design of materials. How do we classify materials? Why do we build with certain materials? What are the energy, health, and societal implications of materials? And what does the future of materials look like? The goal of this course is to enable students to understand the full systems ecology of materials and how to leverage this knowledge in building design.

This course is the fourth of four modules (6121, 6122, 6125, & 6126) and constitutes part of the core curriculum in architecture.