2012-2018
Foundations for Design Computation

The idea for a book arose from conversations with my co-author and those in the design computation community about how to demystify design computation. The book took shape during a period of time when I was building up a core strength in design computation, both in practice through consulting for architecture firms and teaching. A major challenge that we saw in the architecture field was that while opportunities for computation had grown in practice, the academic curriculum struggled to keep pace.  

The vision for the book was to emphasize fundamental concepts while also providing real-life scenarios in which computational design has been critical in generating solutions and broadening the possibility for innovation. I had the privilege to troubleshoot versions of what makes good fundamentals (of code and geometry) to very enthusiastic groups, both in practice and in the classroom. Beyond simple case-study descriptions, the book also provides in-depth insights into the processes employed.  As a central companion to the book, a platform-independent computational library (called Decod.es) was implemented in Python to house these examples.

Publications:

Joy Ko and Kyle Steinfeld, Geometric Computation: Foundations for Design (Routledge, 2018)

K. Steinfeld and J. Ko, Decodes: A Platform-Independent Computational Design Environment in Open Systems in Proceedings of the 18th Conference on Computer-Aided Architectural Design Research in Asia CAADRIA Singapore (2013), 499-508