CSCI 2952Y

This course has two central goals: to teach the fundamental concepts behind computational design and fabrication systems, and to teach students how to conduct and communicate research in this area. The course is designed to sit somewhere between a traditional assignment-based class and a fully open-ended research seminar, with the goal of getting the best of both worlds: students learn and implement core technical concepts while also developing an original idea into a working system and research paper.

Students pursue both goals through a semester-long team project. Each team will design and build a computational design system in a domain of its choice. The project follows a sequence of milestones aligned with the lectures: teams will (1) define a design representation and design space, (2) build an interactive tool for direct design, (3) develop a fabrication pipeline, (4) introduce computational methods for automating parts of the design process—often through optimization—and (5) evaluate the resulting system. This structure allows students to immediately apply concepts from lecture while progressively building, testing, and refining a system that works.

In parallel, students will learn how to position and communicate their work as research. Writing milestones will accompany the system milestones, with feedback throughout the semester, and lectures will also address research writing and presentation.

The goal is for students to finish the course with both a working computational design system and a paper that can serve as the basis for a research publication. Projects from recent offerings have subsequently been published at ACM SIGGRAPH and the ACM Symposium on Computational Fabrication (SCF), leading venues in the field. We hope that multiple projects from this offering will likewise develop into publishable research.