Media, papers, books, blog posts or articles about Grasshopper and Computational Design?

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Permalink Reply by David Stasiuk on August 25, 2015 at 11:10am

There is a massive body of written work, certainly on Computational Design in general, though much less so on Grasshopper explicitly. I think the motivations for most people who write on the subject to be less from a tool-centric perspective, and more often geared toward general platforms (like BIM, or "computational" design).

For papers, I would search Cumincad first, as it captures a great deal of history as well as more current research from the proceedings of the eCAADe and ACADIA family of conferences. There are thousands of articles there.

Robert Woodbury's "Elements of Parametric Design" is considered pretty foundational. Sean Ahlquist and Achim Menges also put together a good anthology a few years back called "Computational Design Thinking" that collects several texts that are in line with the ICD's interests in biomimesis and emergence. "Inside Smartgeometry" is a good combination of theory, historical reflection, and state-of-the-art and edited by Brady and Terri Peters.

But really there is so much out there! One of my favorite short papers is Tom Maver's "CAAD's Seven Deadly Sins" which was basically a keynote mic-drop at the 1995 CAAD Futures conference. I'll spoil the end for you:

"7 Failure to criticise: Above all we have failed to exercise our critical faculties in relation to almost all of the research and development carried out by ourselves and by our peers in recent years. There has been a cosy conspiracy in the community to condone, even encourage, selfindulgent speculation and solipsism - a thoroughly bad example to set for young people in the academic community.

Conclusion: Perhaps these criticism are unjustly hard. Hopefully CAAD Futures 95 will prove me wrong or at least provide the opportunity for discussion."

Permalink Reply by Christian Schmidts on August 25, 2015 at 2:34pm

Thank you David for all these recommendations. I wasn't aware of most of them and read only one, which is the "Computational Design Thinking" reader since I studied at the ICD a while ago.

Thank you also for quoting from the "CAAD's Seven Deadly Sins". I will take a look at that as soon as possible as I'm always interested on theories that take an ideological almost religious point of view.

At the moment I'm reading "Aesthetics of the Digital" from Claudia Giannetti (unfortunately  the English version exists only as a online summary:http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/themes/aesthetics_of_the_digital/) but in that book she seize an idea of Jorge Wagenbergs "Las regal del juego" where he basically says that if the desired knowledge is rather governed by paradigms or world views than rules we should adopt radically different principles then the scientific ones (like art for instance).

The point that I wanted to make is that the people that claim to be the most scientific approach (like Menges e.g.) to me are the greatest artists. Not sure if this makes sense outside of my head but I'm curios to hear opinions.

That's why one my favorite books on the topic (and also to make one recommendation as well) is "Scripting Cultures" from Mark Burry where insists that scripting cultures is a plural and not a singular.

 

  

Permalink Reply by ng5 Alex on August 25, 2015 at 5:14pm

reading you comment, where you mention religious, i thought of this article . its not about design, but somewhat relevant.

cheers

alex

Permalink Reply by Christian Schmidts on August 25, 2015 at 8:10pm

interesting - that's the direction i wanted to head to..

This is a great paradox! 

Permalink Reply by Daniel Kolling Andersen on August 25, 2015 at 2:14pm

I like Daniel Davis' blog: http://www.danieldavis.com/

Permalink Reply by ng5 Alex on August 25, 2015 at 2:20pm

+1 lots of stuff there. his phd thesis has lots of info and grasshopper is mentioned too.

Permalink Reply by Christian Schmidts on August 25, 2015 at 2:37pm

nice blog I wasn't aware of!