 Hi, everyone. We're going to get started. I'm Laura Kergan. I'm the Director of the Computational Design Practices Program. And also on the screen is Adam Vosberg, who's the Assistant Director of the Computational Design Practices Program. And as you all know, we are currently in our first year. So this is a, we call it a young program. It's a program that's been initiated and started by and at the school. And so everybody who attends the program is also part of the ecology of the whole of GSAP. So I think the best way to proceed is for me to share my screen and make the presentation. And then afterwards, I'll take the slides off and we can have a conversation and I will answer both of us. Adam and I will answer any questions you might have. Okay, so I'm going to share my screen. Okay, can everybody see the slides and hear me? Okay. All right, so here we are, Columbia University, Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation. And this is a presentation about the Computational Design Practices Program. So as I said, we're in our first year of the programs being, this is the first year of the program being initiated and started. We currently have a group of 12 full-time students and five part-time students. And we're busily engaged in getting everything off the ground. So in terms of the program, the reason for it being at the school at all is that we see it as a technical, critical and creative program that offers students not only the chance to master an array of computational approaches to the built environment, but also as a pathway to transform these approaches and the world we live in. So in terms of the way that we envision the program moving and growing and in terms of what you will get when you, if you attend the program, is these four things, that it's a concept which includes a new understanding of how we teach computational design as an integrated and multi-dimensional and specifically spatial approach to computational design. So in terms of what you'll be doing, it's an intervention-oriented pedagogy for emerging designers so that you define what it is you think of as practice. And we give you an array of tools, you bring data, and we teach you a whole lot of technologies, and especially with the point of view that these technologies and tools are not neutral in the design process. So through this, we encourage a curriculum that is critical and creative at the same time and engages with computational design as both a method and a practice. So in general, we're aiming for high-impact work from the students on issues that are very relevant to the contemporary world we live in and to its present and future. And we really want socially engaged practices to give something and to bring something to this emerging field. And we say this with a full knowledge that in architectural design and planning, computational design and its impacts are both positive and negative on the built environment. So although, you know, and it's, we can't ignore the fact that computation is addressed by many other programs and many other schools at Columbia, not only at GSAP, in GSAP as well, but in the university at large. But we understand ourselves and we define ourselves as the first program that connects computational methods to spatial design, analysis, visualization, fabrication, and research through a project-based pedagogy directed at architecture and the built environment across multiple scales. So our overarching assumption is that incoming CDP students, and they are this year as well, a mix of designers and architects interested in computation and a group of technologists interested in design and the built environment. And that combination of students is very vibrant and has, you know, a lot of potential to emerge. So I want to start by giving you just a very quick curriculum overview. The program has a colloquium, three semesters with six credit classes. It has a series of foundation classes, and there are seven of those, three of which are online for zero credits before you enter the program. And then there's a series of electives, which you take to fill out a full-time curriculum or a part-time one. So I'm going to go more into detail on these. Let us, we're going to start with the colloquium. Okay, so as I said, three classes, six credits each. And the program in general is three semesters. And in the summer, it's a seven-week, sometimes six-week, very intensive introduction to methods and practices of computational design, right? So here, the colloquium is a six-credit class. And we ask students and we ask ourselves to define what is spatial computation, what are its methods and its practices and its politics, right? So here you get a range of tools and an introduction to modes of practice, both historical and future models. And you end up with a position paper, which you've been working on throughout the semester, or a series of position papers, depending on who is teaching the class. So the second semester, which we're in the middle of now, and that class is taught by Dan Taeyang. The second semester, which we're engaged in now, is colloquium two, and it's called explore, explain, propose. I'm teaching this with Snoraria Zhang, who I'll tell you a little bit more about later. And over here, we think about what kinds of projects do we want to create? What futures are we envisioning? And what worldviews do those make possible? So in this colloquium, I teach the reading, theoretical, the overview part. And Snoraria Zhang also introduces a range of labs into the colloquium. And so through this process, this design process, which we introduce you to, students selects tools and data to create a project. And they also, by the end of the semester, have selected collaborators and advisors. So the end product over here is a project proposal. Then in the third semester, which is in the spring semester, there's another colloquium called design in action. And over here, you take everything that you've done over the year by combining scales, methods and disciplines, and ask yourself what kind of practice, spatial practice will emerge out of what you've been doing. So over here, so over here, we ask, is your project a creative technology project? Is it an activism project? Is it a startup project? Is it a research project? Everything is possible from the design of an algorithm to a peer review paper, to designing a sensor, to doing an art installation, to doing a parametric urban model of a smart city, and beyond anything beyond them. Maybe there's something we don't know of that you're going to bring to the table. So over here, we have one coordinator who will also do part reading, part studio based project. Every one of the colloquiums is a seminar studio mixture, which is really a nice way. You'll find that it's a really, students are really loving that aspect of it. Over here, so you'll have exposure to that one teacher, and then you will have an advisor, which you will speak to once every two weeks. And that advisor could be another GSAP faculty, or it could be somebody from outside of GSAP, where in the middle of students are busily engaged right now in talking to advisors about their work. So your end product over here is a project presentation and implementation where possible, not everybody will do something that actually gets physically built or remote roadmap for a future project. Okay, so then the next part we're going to talk about is the foundation part of the program. And I'm going to start here by talking about the zero credit fully online foundation courses. So everybody that gets accepted to the program is asked to consider the skills which they currently have, and what skills they want to build before entering the program. So to do that, we've got three kinds of courses, computational drawing, programming for design practices, and mapping and data. And through this interface that we've designed, there are a series of tutorials that accompany them. And it's also Columbia's contribution to both GSAP and to a larger world with these fully open online tutorials. And so we've called it the computational design practices summer smorgasbord, because you pick and choose and take little bites of things and expose yourself to large array of methods. And this is what it looks like. We'll give you the link to this after the presentation is over, but you can see all the tutorials are there, and they will get updated by the people who teach the classes every time they teach them. Okay. And so just to go into that just a little bit more, within the three classes, we have kind of five buckets of tutorials. The one is mapping and data, which is cute, which is a QGIS module. Then we have programming for design practices, which is a very basic more architectural programming language called grasshopper. Then we have the more conventional computational version of Python, but specifically geared to the built environment and to spatial data. Then we have programming for design practices, part of the section C, which is web development, and also thinking about a website as a spatial design project. And then lastly is computational drawing. For those of you who've had absolutely no three dimensional drawing knowledge, and it's a series of tutorials to teach you basically what is a plan, what is a section, what is a digital model, etc. Okay. The next, still continuing with the foundation classes are the full credit classes. And right now there are four of those, right? So there's basically a seven course credit requirement for the whole program. So the first is computational modeling. The second is computational design workflows. The third is mapping systems. And the fourth is design intelligence. The first three are part of the intensive summer program. So if you look over here, right, this is the pre-program, which is the smorgasbord, which are the zero credit classes. Then the summer intensive, six or seven weeks. We have computational modeling, which teaches, which Luke Wilson teaches. And it's an advanced parametrics course, which introduces you to scripting and custom workflows at generally an urban scale, right? So really thinking about cities and the implication of merging data, code, cities, and all kinds of iterations to help you to rethink both the virtual physical interfaces, and also the way that you can look at city through its, you know, its organizational codes and its digital codes. The second course is computational design workflows, which is really a web-based platform and thinks about how to integrate a lot of the other work that you're doing and to create workflows by presenting them on the website. So over here, you do a little bit of advanced Python. You do tool building and custom workflows to bring together, say, you know, maps and I don't know, animations or something like that. And then the third is web visualization, which is JavaScript. Then the third class, which is actually going to be different this year is called mapping systems. And over here, we're really going to focus on interactive web maps. You'll do mapping with Jupyter notebook, which means that you do, you don't do QGIS, you do Python, you build on what you've done in the smorgasbord and all kinds of ways of handling spatial data through Python. Then in the full semester, there's one last required seminar, which is design intelligence, and that's taught by Danil Najee. And it's using algorithms and design, advanced statistics and visualization. So it builds on what you do in both mapping systems and computational modeling and introduces a little bit of machine learning into design practices and especially optimization for design practices. So you'll sometimes come up with like 500, you know, versions of what you're designing for specific iterations on either urban scale or architectural scale. Okay, so we are now going to talk about the electives. And here is a really exciting part of the program, because you really have access to multiple classes that are taught through the whole of GSAP. So in architecture, urban design, advanced architectural design, urban planning, real estate, you know, the history and theory courses, which are really amazing. And you choose those based on your specific interests and also with a lot of help from Adam and I, talking about what you think your capstone project will be and which electives we think are most appropriate to what your interests are. And so over here, you can see there's a whole range of classes which already sort of cross disciplines at GSAP. So the VizTech class, Visual Technology combines the tech sequence in architecture with the visual studies or the visual technology. And there's a lot of classes in there that are appropriate for this program. There's a lot of interdisciplinary classes which go across GSAP. There's urban analytics, which is in the urban planning department, etc. I'm happy to answer questions about that. So just kind of bringing it all together, here's our understanding of the grid of how we conceptualize the CDP program. So we understand that all students who apply have come from one of these quadrants. And each of these quadrants has its own strengths and its own weaknesses or its own limits or potentials. And what we're trying to do is bring you all into the top right quadrant. So if you have a technology background and you just understand technology for technology's sake, we want you to apply your methods to the built environment and to architecture and urbanism by really thinking about how and why these tools have impact on the built environment. And if you have absolutely no background at all in computer, in programming and in computation, we understand that you bring your conceptual critique to this right quadrant. And then the projects that end up being implemented are there, you know, they have a critical approach to technology. They involve activism in some way and spatial computation, which involves a lot of different methods which you learn as you enter the program, right? So it's for students who want to develop a technical foundation where they have none. And it's also a project-based learning curriculum designed for students to develop a critical approach to computation in the context of the built environment, focusing on specific sets of technologies, tools and concepts. And that integration is really important to us. And it's already producing some really interesting conversations and arguments amongst our students. So, you know, just to bring it home and to be very specific about it, we imagine, you know, a student who comes from computer science and urban studies, and that students waves out of some of the zero-credit classes and take a lot of electives because they've already had a lot of computational education. But they take all the classes that relate to spatial computation because they might not have known or understood, you know, what that is. Then on the other hand, we want to accept students that have just a BA in architecture and no computation at all. And they might wave out of, you know, the how to draw in 3D because they already know how to do that. But then they focus much more on the classes, on the technical classes because they come in with a history theory or philosophy or, you know, some other background. So, we already have a really great range of faculty. So, myself, just to introduce myself a little bit more, I wear a lot of hats at the school. Some of the director of the computational design practices program. I'm also a professor of architecture. I teach advanced studios and seminars. And I'm also the director of the Center for Spatial Research, which I hope you all look at online. And we do a lot of advanced mapping and data visualization projects. And also, right now, I coordinate the visual study sequence, which is integrated with the computational design program. Adam Vosberg. This is his first year as the assistant director. And he has a background in architecture. He is a graduate of the school and really understands the whole environment and ecology of GSEP and brings an amazing amount of his own knowledge of computational design. David Benjamin. He's an associate professor. He runs a firm called The Living. And he's really interested in embodied energy as well as generative design. He's one of the advisors in the spring semester. Lola Ben-Alan, who has a PhD from Carnegie Mellon, runs the Natural Materials Lab and is also the director of the technology sequence. And we collaborate very closely on these kinds of courses that bring technology and visualization together. She's also an advisor in the spring semester. Leah Meisterlin is a assistant professor of urban planning and a GIS methodologist. And she will be on leave this year, but her GIS course in the full semester is open to all the students and has a specific section, which is geared towards computation. Then we have an amazing adjunct faculty who are all very deeply embedded in practice in New York City. So Carlo Bailey is going to be teaching the mapping systems class. And he's a senior data scientist at VTS and runs a prop tech, which is a prop tech company. Celeste Lane, an assistant, she does the programming for design practices course. She's a member of dark lab and a collective at the intersection of scholarship, artistic practice and storytelling. She's also a member of Architechies. Daniel Naji, he teaches the generative design. He's also an advisor. He also teaches design intelligence in the fall. He has his own startup right now, really dealing with generative design in the building industry. He also worked with David Benjamin for a number of years. Dan Taeyang is a, I would call him a more activist kind of entrepreneur. He teaches the colloquium. And then he also teaches meta tool in the spring semester, which is a physical computation class. He is a very inspiring person and considers himself also a learner, which is really part of the way that he runs his pedagogy. He also has started up two collectives called soft surplus and prime produce. Luke Wilson has run a research unit at a corporate design firm called KPF and runs a think tank there, where they do a lot of parametric urbanism. Violet Whitney has also been teaching in the program, does the responsive architecture, responsive systems class, and also another class called measuring the great indoors. She currently works at Google on a project called Delve, which is another kind of generative design urban platform. She also worked on inside work labs for a while. Jia Zhang, who was a research associate at the Center for Spatial Research, she is, has a PhD from MIT Media Lab. And she right now is working at a nonprofit called USA Facts and is awesome at data visualization. And so no area Zhang also works at Google. And she's currently co teaching the colloquium with me and will teach X information modeling in the spring. So that's an amazing array of people and of practices and of forms of practice, which we're trying to encourage for you. And we're also providing you with people who exemplify this environment and this, you know, mode of learning and of thinking and of practicing. And, you know, they will also make help you make that transition out of school as well. So just to show you some examples of the work that has already been produced. This is from the summer. Also here's the range of disciplines that people who entered the program came from. I'm not going to read them all to you, but you can see how diverse the backgrounds of the students are. Here's our final review in the summer. This is Ziyu Zhang presenting her mental palace, which she's developing this semester using GPT three and teaching the computer to learn about her a little bit more accurately over here is snow area with the turquoise earrings is Dan Taeyang second from the right and Celeste Lane, the other two and yeah, the other two I guess critics. And here is some other student work from the from the summer seminars. This is from Violet's responsive architecture course. This is from computational workflows led by Celeste Lane. And this is computational modeling and parametric urbanism by Luke. And here are some of the results of the colloquium where all the students, as we told you about these position papers, they all produced an artifact and an essay, which came together and combined all the things that they were learning in the three seminars. This is Lucia's project Lucia Rebellino. And then just to end the presentation, here are some of here are some work samples from the this tech elective sequence. So this is from measuring the great indoors by Violet Whitney. This is meta tool as I was telling you the physical computation and Dan is very interested in this kind of physical digital interface. This is from generative design by Daniel Naji. And this is methods in spatial research, which is taught by Der Brohle. And this year will be taught by Adam Vassberg. And here are some of the student work from my advanced design studio, but very related to the kind of thing that's possible. Also in computational design practices. This is Jia Zhang. And this is where we will end. You know, we expect that if you're interested in computation, the built environment design and, you know, is a real question mark for us. So activism, algorithms and social justice, creative technology, data visualization, design justice, all these things. And we hope that you as students add some more things to this list. Just to address the question that Adi already asked once about when the summer semester begins. So the pre program runs for four weeks from June to July. But, you know, it's online and it's a story base. You could start earlier if you want. But we do have mentors that next year will actually be the graduating students from this year who will be available to help you then. So that's from June to July. And then from the beginning of July until mid-August is the six or seven weeks that were intensive.