Type

A series of lectures, tech tutorials, ideation and presentation workshops, and creative coding sessions supported by the workshop team.

Workshop objectives

Participatory web-based design tools engage the public in urban form making, capture feedback and assist in identifying best design solutions.

This workshop breaks down the development of participatory urban design tools into a series of tech tutorials and creative coding sessions. Designing meaningful interaction will be emphasized in combination with intelligent control over urban geometries (roads, parcels, green/blue spaces, public spaces, and building typologies).

Participants will explore advanced tools to change traditional design workflows and collaborate in teams to create their own web-hosted interactive urban design interface. The workshop will provide hands-on learning with three.js, rhino.compute, AWS, python scripting, optimization and web design.

Participants requirements

Required skills: Intermediate knowledge of Rhino/Grasshopper. Basic knowledge of web development (HTML, CSS, JS).
Required software: Chrome, Visual Studio 2019, Visual Studio Code and Rhino 7 installed
Required hardware: Own windows machine

Workshop description

Urban design and planning tools can reach a broader audience and achieve greater social impact by incorporating automated design generation into accessible and interactive web-applications. These tools will allow concerned residents, government officials and real estate developers to participate in the process of designing the city. Our team is currently developing a web-based urban design optimization tool which is intended to enhance user interest and engagement. The tool currently assists urban planners to generate optimized parcel layouts and road networks based on boundary derived vector-field streamlines, for which it generates building geometries in a second step, testing densities and orientations.

We propose a workshop that starts with a demonstration of the tool and the story of its creation, with emphasis on the workflow of web application development. We will break down the significant development steps into a series of tech tutorials and creative coding sessions that will permit the participants to create their own web-hosted interactive urban design tools by the end of the two-day workshop. The workshop will enable people with backgrounds in the architectural and planning industry to quickly develop web applications that can engage the public, elicit participation, or collect information.

The focus of the workshop will be on designing interaction in combination with providing intelligent control over urban geometries (roads, parcels, green/blue spaces, public spaces, and building typologies). Simulation of urban spaces will be discussed broadly but will not be explicated in an in-depth tutorial.

The target audience will be students and professionals in the AEC industry who want to explore advanced tools to change traditional design workflows. We would expect them to have intermediate to advanced experience with Rhino/Grasshopper 3d modelling and basic knowledge of web development (HTML, CSS, JS). We will encourage workshop participants to propose ideas together and collaborate in teams to build their own web applications.

Target group

Students and professionals in the AEC industry

Number of participatns max.

12

Duration and Procedure

His doctoral research built on insights from critical data studies and computational design to elucidate the changing role of architecture and architect in complex, data-driven urban systems.

Peter received a PhD from EPFL where his doctoral thesis was nominated for the EPFL and City of Lausanne prizes. At EPFL Peter was a collaborator with Media x Design Lab, a cross-disciplinary team of designers and computer scientists. He holds a Master’s in Architecture from Harvard University where he was recipient of the Faculty Design Award, and a Bachelor of Arts cum laude with distinction in architecture from Yale University. Peter has practiced architecture in the United States and Switzerland.
Peter has experience running computational design workshops at the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne, MxD Lab for MArch students (2012-2019), Singapore University of Technology and Design for undergraduate and graduate students (2018-2023), and digital design + fabrication workshops at the University of Applied Arts Vienna as part of their summer DDF series (2014).

As a researcher in 2020, JingZhi has researched and published multiple works revolving around the central idea of using optimisation and computational models to improve design processes. The research includes optimizing dormitory schedules to reduce the risk of over congestion in worker’s dormitories during Covid-19 and developing an optimizable furniture system based on the 9R circular economy framework.

JingZhi has experience in organizing and running computational design workshops at SUTD (2021-2022) and experience as a teaching assistant for a 6-week computational thinking and design course for undergraduate students (2021).