 Welcome to the Masters in Science and Computational Design Practices Open House. I'm Laura Kurgan. I'm the director of the program. We are currently accepting our third cohort of students. We call ourselves the youngest program at GSAC. And it's very exciting for me to have to have developed and started this new program. And the first two cohorts of students have been exceptional. And I'm going to show you some of their work. And as you go through that missions process, I hope you'll talk to some of the current students. So this is Avery Hall. And I know you're all in different parts of the world right now as you watch this open house. But this is the building that you will spend a lot of your time in as you are a student here. So as I said, we've really developed this program from the ground up. And we call it 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 a pathway to transform these approaches and the world that we live in. We all have the understanding that computation has done a lot of good and a lot of harm in the world, and we are very aware of this as we approach what we do. So in terms of pedagogy, it's a very new kind of approach to the built environment. We take a very multi dimensional and spatial approach to computational design. And we think of ourselves as a very action oriented pedagogy for emerging designers and thinkers. So the tools, data and technology that we deploy are never neutral in the design process and we very aware of that as we teach you a lot of different methods. And so our curriculum really encourages a critical and creative engagement with computational design as both a method and as a practice. We also foster a studio environment with students and you work alongside other students at GSAP. So if you come from a different discipline, you'll learn as you go through this open house what a studio environment is. So, although computation is addressed in other programs at the school and at the university. Our program is the very first one 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 a range of scales and that's really important because you can see that in the images that are over here which are all images that have been made by students in the program. So the most important thing for us is that we are a pre professional and a post professional program. So the CDP students are a mix of designers and architects interested in computation, as well as technologists interested in design and the built environment and it's that mix of students that creates a very dynamic cohort. We use this two by two grid to explain what it is that we're trying to do. And, you know, if you come from a background in the humanities, or maybe even, you know, an undergraduate urban studies program or an anthropology program. If you come with a lot of conceptual critique and know how to comment and analyze and take a critical approach to things. If you come from a computer science background. You might have, you know, this approach that technology is for technology sake and having, you know, a bias towards solving the problems in the world only through technology. We encourage everybody into the top right hand corner in our program, and to encourage critical computation, an action oriented approach to what you're doing with competition, and creative entrepreneurialism. So we think of the program as both a computational curriculum for students to develop a technical foundation, as well as and most importantly, 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 tech sets of technologies tools and concepts. So just for a quick curriculum overview. You can see that we have a colloquium a series of colloquium studios, a series of foundational classes, and a series of elective classes and I'm going to explain what all of those mean. So the first thing the first way you encounter a curriculum is through an online pre program. And it's a fully, fully, fully online foundation courses that we recommend which segments of it you should engage with based on your background and experience. So the courses involve a series of tutorial tutorials and many resources that accompany them that are also gseps contribution to schools and computational design worldwide so it's completely open source, you can already see it right now it's called the smorgasbord. If you look for it online. So these facilitate a bit of basic data literacy and pro and learning programming languages specifically geared towards spatial concepts and offered in a coherent manner with project based examples for spatial analysis and design. So a lot of tutorials is specifically written with our own pedagogical approach, all the tutorials are written by the teachers, who will also be engaged, you know, in the seminars and courses that you will take so they can buy the teachers that you will take courses with. So this is all the summer smorgasbord. If you are accepted into the program and you enroll in April you have, you have immediate access to it now but you will be expected to take these tutorials before you come to New York in July. So this is what it looks like. Everything is hosted on a GitHub site. And there's a range of tutorials that span the range of things that you'll also go into in more depth as you come to the school. So smorgasbord is divided into these five segments which are really three courses. The first is computational drawings that you've never done a three dimensional drawing, or you know, any kind of drawing at all in your life. That part is essential for you to take, and there's a series of tutorials in Rhino, which is a three dimensional computational drawing program. The second part is called Programming for Design Practices, which is divided into three sections. One is Grasshopper, which is a visual coding language associated with Rhino. And the second introduces YouTube Python, so data as spatial code. And the third is is web development. And those are three things that a lot of students then go further into depth when they choose their elective classes. The third class is mapping and data, and actually Adam Vosberg is the one who is developing those tutorials and he teaches a class called methods in spatial research in the spring semester. The second thing that is the core of our curriculum is the colloquium, and we call them colloquium studios and they're each, you know, four hours a week in the summer intensive that it's actually eight hours a week. During the summer, the first one is called Methods as Practices and Practices as Methods. We really focus there on, you know, what is the definition of computation for the built environment, what are its methods, practices, politics. That course this past summer was taught by Violet Whitney and William Martin, who are very dynamic duo who took the students through this range of concerns. The second colloquium I teach along with Snow area Zhang, it's called explore explain propose. Over there we focus on a lot of one half the class on critical readings and invite and introduce students to the, the concepts and politics of how to approach making a proposal. And by the end of the semester, you propose the project that we will do in the spring semester which is called design in action, which is taught by Seth Thompson. And it is also, you also work with an advisor who you meet with every once every two weeks so you have an instructor who you talk to once, you know, once a week about your project as it's moving along. And to an advisor once every two weeks in the full semester. Snow area and I do a range, as I said, of just reading discussions and labs during the four hour session of the of the class and then a desperate once a week to talk about how your proposal is moving along. So then, following that, there are a series of foundational courses so I've already described the pre program, then they are full courses that are required by all computational design practices students. The one is computational modeling, which is really about procedural design and urban computation. And is computational design workflows which focuses on web design and a little bit of sensor sensor sensor design. And the third is mapping systems where we focus on analyzing data sets and we use Jupiter notebooks to address that. And the third class is called design intelligence where we focus a little bit on artificial intelligence and optimization in the design process. Okay, so here's a sort of more a little bit of the expanded layout of what those classes are. Following that we have a series of elective classes, which are really all over the map, depending on what you're interested in. Of course, there are 100 plus electives across GSAP, and there are 18 specific computation electives, which we curate as a series of classes that are geared towards the computational design practices program. So we're constantly going to be updating those, you know, to reflect the most current and most up to date technologies and practices that you will likely want to be engaged in. This is the current range of things, you know, from design intelligence, which as you know is one of the required classes data visualization. We focus on building information management. We have, you know, UX design has become spatial UX, all kinds of classes over here and you can ask me questions about any of those we're introducing this year physical computation. There's also AR and VR and, you know, also use of specific data kinds of data in design. And then you're also depending on your background. For example, if you come in with a lot of computation you might want to focus more on history and theory you might want to focus on building technology. You might want to focus on urban analytics classes that are in the offer by the urban planning program, or even real estate classes. There are also classes that you can take outside of GSAP, you know, perhaps in the business school or in the computer science school, things like that. Okay, so here's what a typical curriculum looks like so everybody has to do some part of the online curriculum. And then in the summer, there's no options at all you have to take these four classes. And then in the fall you take, you know, each semester you take the colloquium in relation to a lot of elective classes. And then you have the option of being a part time student. Most part time students take the two year option, where they do some part of the, the summer curriculum. And then they often do all the seminar classes in the first year. And in the second year, they take the colloquium classes. So here's the option which we have not, we've not diagrammed over here, but as I say, most part time students have taken the two year option so far. So here's the range of faculty and you can see that the full time faculty are myself. So here's the program is the assistant director. David Benjamin is also very involved with the program he does a lot of work on embodied energy and climate and technology, Lola Ben Elan who runs the natural materials lab and is the director of the technology sequence. And then I think that Shirlen is GIS methodologist and very involved in the urban analytics program and Anthony Vanky, who also teaches a class on advanced analytics and also sensors design of sensors. And then our adjunct faculty. I encourage you to look all of them up as I think you know Violette Whitney worked at Google Dell for a long time she's now starting her own practice. Luke Wilson has also been involved with the program and setting it up runs a research unit at KPF. Jiang does very experimental work, thinking about space beyond the screen and space as computation as such. Celeste Lane does a lot of work in computation and web design. Carla Bailey does a lot of work around prop tech. She is more of a data scientist she is an amazing data visualization person and snow area who teaches with me is also at Google Delf and also very much involved in procedural design and also has an incredible artistic practice. Yeah, so look all of these people up. KP has also had a really great event series we started out the, you know, the first year with a L white man of forensic architecture. This year, we had three people carry hack it as, as you can see, a sticky zoo, who was very involved with sidewalk labs, and like he gave a really amazing talk about the, how to measure how to measure the internet. Last year we had far as in lofty jam, who did a really interesting talk on real time urbanism. Sam Levine told us a lot of things about web scraping and the limits of, you know, all kinds of technologies and experimental practices. We will continue to have this kind of events and especially in the summer when you first arrive. So here it is again the summer semester, just to reinforce it's very intensive the summer and it's designed to be intensive so that you really, you know, dig deep into methods and what they mean for specific practices. The colloquium is six credits and then you do these nine credits of the seminars students have come from all over the world. They also come from a lot of different backgrounds, you know, really from GIS to exhibition design to computer science to data science to graphic design, you know, it's really a really great combination of expertise of students. So here is some of the work that was produced this summer. So these, this is the work that came out of both the seminars and out of the colloquium. It's a little bit of sound over here which is great and Matthew Heaton, who has a very strong background in GIS is now focusing on sound in his work. The other is focusing on on experimenting with mapping as a practice as such and doing a lot of work with AI. Elizabeth who had a background in computer science was experimenting with sort of autobiography and sketching at the same time. So as you can see, you know, the methods during the summer were, you know, with just that they were, they were methods. Not really focusing on a specific project proposal. This was a final review in the summer. Here are the faculty that's now areas and Anthony Vanky, Dan Taeyang and Celeste Lane. And then in the fall semester, you are responsible for the colloquium six credit class and design intelligence and then 203 elective classes. And this is also some of the work that came out of this class last year. So George for Daisy was doing, he was almost doing an interior GPS project, but using blockchain so that people's privacy was protected. This was work by Lucia Rebellino, who was working on the 5G network and the fact that the frequency interfered with a weather satellite and she was trying to, you know, and trying to understand why and how this happened. This is Shang Xi who did who he may he spent a lot of time making a data set which doesn't didn't exist about the kinds of investments that people who can buy a green card by doing development projects in the US. So this is Violet's class, which is spatial UX really trying to think beyond the screen. She has a whole periodic table that she's devised about the kinds of sensors that are already in our environment and the ways in which we can use them creatively and critically to understand all of these things. And this is a little bit of the work from Jia Zhang's data visualization class. And then in the spring semester, you do design in action which is the six credit class and again they are about 304 elective seminars that you take that are that that we really help you to choose to have a relationship with the kind of capstone of thesis that you're working on students are also allowed to request money to travel, which has a specific relation to the work that they're doing in their capstone and thesis as well. Some people choose to go to conferences like SXSW in in Austin. Some people went and did field work. And, you know, and some people went off to research locations to look at some specific technologies. So here are some examples of the capstone work. This is Sarah Lee Sittagaroon, and her advisor was Seth Thompson and Dan Tian. And she was doing she designed a clock, which really took into account very different kinds of time cycles to do with habits to do with your gender to do with, you know, all kinds of things was really super interesting work. This is Jin Ling Zhang. Actually, this is for a seminar class that he did the environments animals and technologies where he combined sensors and a little bit of artificial intelligence. This is work from Adams methods in spatial research class, you know, different kinds of GIS methodologies. And here are a lot of the capstone projects. All of the work in our program. We really encourage people to put to actually require that everybody does a website by the end of their capstone. It doesn't mean that all the work they do is on a specific website on, you know, on the actual website it can link to broader projects that you do or two models that you build or, you know, incorporate video and in what you're doing. Here are some of the examples so this one. Yeah. Again, this is Sarah Lee's project I already talked about it. This project was done by Eddie Joe, and he focused on the LinkedIn terminals. All over New York City and try to think about the different ways that public Wi Fi can be used in the city, you know, it's, it's an existing resource that is there and it's very underutilized and he had a lot of different ideas for how that could happen. So again, she is project. And you can see, she really was thinking about different points of view and the way that you can understand this technology at very different scales from looking down from looking up at the sky. From looking at the perception from the weather satellite and beyond. I have a friend from New Zealand, who did a very different kind of project. It was about food networks in Chinatown in New York City, the one that's in downtown New York and was looking at the transformations over time on the way in which both gentrification and COVID had an effect on this very unique food network. She did a lot of work scraping Google Street View on the one hand, but also did a lot of field work and interviews, and her project was very much a spatial data narrative. And so, you know, that's that's a very quick scan through all the things to through some of the thesis projects. I'm happy to say the students have been getting amazing jobs as they have graduated. I don't want to sort of name all of those things that I'm leaving it on the screen a little bit so you can see where they are. I do reinforce once again that our program is really, you know, computation, the built environment design and whatever you choose that you want it to be. So, some people think of it as activism, algorithms and social justice creative technology, data visualization design justice this whole list of things over here. What is unique about our program and the fact that we have a small cohort at the moment is that we focus on unique advising and individual advising for each student. We really work with you based on the experience that you bring into the program, and we direct you towards the things that will help you do what you want to do when you graduate.