Digital Media for Design

The course will focus on the interrogation and acquisition of different emerging and established digital design approaches for designers. Students will gain knowledge of digital design media as well as many of the wide range of design approaches that constitute the larger field of digital/computational design in landscape, architecture and urban design.  These will be conducted through the exploration of a number of exercises and techniques that illustrate different digital design approaches, ranging from associative to generative design. The classes will be conducted around various exercises and techniques departing from the study and deployment of material behavior abstracted from natural and abstract organizations and processes.

Along with an interest in exploring digital modeling skills, an emphasis will be placed on exploiting the capacity for design software and diagramming techniques to model and integrate both complex material and time based difference and transformation in landscape, architectural and urban patterns, behaviors, performance and formation processes.

In this course, students will be guided to develop actual skills and a conceptual understanding of digital 3d modeling, computational simulation, and associative/parametric as well as generative design approaches. The course will be conducted as a weekly seminar in the computer lab. Exercises will be introduced and developed within class time with an interim and final document of the exercises to be submitted for course grading.