#design-education

Today, we tried to understand one of the ways of generating multiple planes in Grasshopper. This is an important step in utilizing the robot program efficiently. Instead of manually jogging the robot, we designed the path that the robot will dig lots of chopsticks. In the “Robotic Chopstick Digger Exercise”, every student designed their own paths and decided the height, orientation, and number of sticks to be dug on an EPS block. I provided the Rhino and Grasshopper files with…

In the Digital Fabrication course, I needed to explain the plane orientation and rotation angles. This is why I prepared this Spatial Recognition Test. This is an important topic regarding the matching of the TCP (tool center point) plane of the robot and the plane(s) designers generate. In Rhino, we define a construction plane by red (X), green (Y), and blue (Z) colors. The relative positions among those axes are the well-known “right-hand rule”. In mathematics and physics, the right-hand…

In the Digital Fabrication course, we are in the middle of a sea, full of technical details, and students need motivation. This is why I felt I should do something simple and educational but funny at the same time; a “kissing the cube” exercise. The planned exercise was about programming the robot to touch every facet of a cube without colliding with it. Of course, we couldn’t manage to kiss all the facets due to the limitation of the robot’s…

In this semester, I started a new elective course at İstanbul Bilgi University Faculty of Architecture. Second, third and fourth-year architecture, interior design, and industrial design students attend the course titled “Digital Fabrication”. I am very excited to study the basics of robotic fabrication together with the students. I’ll try to report the content of the lectures and the robot exercises on designcoding.net. Below is the general brief of the course (not specific to any fabrication machine, however, this semester…

Jumping into the world of mathematics as a designer seemed to be frightening at the beginning but I opened a new elective course at Bilgi, Design Mathematics. Starting today, I’ll try to log my experiences with the students while we are trying to understand mathematics. The ultimate objective is to find paths that may lead to answering the following question; “what is the relationship between design and math”? Next week, we’ll start with some of the warm-ups and preparatory topics…

Here is a short series of videos showing the basic usage of Ladybug tools in a canopy design. So, I prepared this for my Parametric Design Systems elective course. Then, I encouraged my students to design their own canopies utilizing a similar Ladybug workflow in Grasshopper. In this first video, I am building a test surface in Grasshopper. I use the Graph Mapper component to derive 3D points and Interpolated curves. Finally, the EdgeSrf component is used to model the…

Here is the abstract of my last publication in the International Journal of Architectural Computing. Parquet Deformations is an architectural studio exercise of William Huff in the 1960s. It aims to improve students’ reasoning of spatiotemporal variation by utilizing sequential shape-shifting of patterns. This article examines the outcomes of this educational research from the perspective of design computing. A multilayered reading about the exercise will reveal its historical, theoretical, and artistic backgrounds. Then we explain the common structural elements and different construction approaches…

This year’s Computation-based Basic Design Studio finals were very successful. Below are some of our student’s design works, and lanterns that light the campus area at İstanbul Bilgi University. It was a great experience for them to seek a design system between the domains of material computation and architectural geometry. 28 first-year students of architecture, interior design, and industrial design completed their projects in groups of 4. Students: Aleyna Demirkök, Aleyna Yıldız, Ali Hayder Ali Al Obaidi, Ara Yerlikaya, Aybike Sarıgül, Ayşe…

Introducing the new YouTube channel for designcoding! The architectural Geometry playlist will contain video tutorials on several topics of basic geometry exercises for designers. Below are the introductory exercises of polyline drawing and some planar transformations such as scale and rotation. It is also an interesting plane-filling fractal you know I like it very much. I studied this particula fractal (Gosper-Peano) earlier here, and here. I find it very inspiring and educational.

Here is one of the exercises I tested with a few students in Architectural Geometry. The exercise is about creating Escher-like patterns. It is an introductory topic on the designerly utilization of regular tessellations. We use square, hexagonal, or triangular tessellations as underlying structures of complex patterns. Below are some of the student works from this exercise. I think the black-and-white coloring helps in terms of reducing the requirements. Although the patterns designed in this exercise are not Escher patterns,…