Lab participants completed their last week of the Pre-Lab on July 17th before finally embarking on the official Lab itself. The last week of the Pre-Lab included a very informative and engaging workshop called Web Apps with Rhino Compute led by Steve Baer of McNeel. The Lab participants were the lucky first individuals to be presented this new, enriching workflow—proprietarily developed by McNeel.
The participants also prepared themselves for the hackathon-based Lab, which kicked off this past Monday on July 20th. They were given their official team assignments and selected what computational design challenges they would tackle during the Lab together. All the participants are now fully immersed in the Lab and working diligently as they compete to see which team will win this year’s Digital Evolution Lab!
See more of our participants and some of their initial submissions below:
Yueshen Mei
I applied for the lab to find if there was any possibility to promote some computational design theory and tools to practice. Communicating with peers who share the same ambition is essential. After participating in several workshops, the committee held that the veil of ‘advanced tools’ like AI and inter collaboration had been uncovered. It is not that difficult to understand how these useful tools work. There is still a lot of work that needs to be done to introduce these tools to our design group.
I enjoyed the LunchboxML workshop the most. Based on my limited knowledge of scripting and machine learning, I can understand how to actually use the tool from the presentation and procedure sharing of Nate Miller and other presenters from Proving Ground. Other workshops, for example, the Design Automation Development given by Danie Gijsbersl, was also extraordinary. But it is a little bit of my daily working routine. Utilizing these tools through the architecture design process may be of some challenge. The waiting list topics are all of great value to excavate. Our team, Gloria, Jeong, and I, had a hard time deciding which topic to focus on because we are good at different computational tools. It is challenging and exciting at the same time if given a topic, for example, topics relating to GIS and urban planning, which I am not very good at. I will use 100% of my enthusiasm to participate and learn a new skill.
Jie Ma
I started to learn computational design and visual scripting not very long ago. I enjoyed it very much. I wrote some simple scripts and they worked well. When they announced Digital Evolution Lab, I figured this is a great opportunity to let the designers in our offices get to know computational design. I applied it by submitting a simple but useful script. I want to let people know that computational design is not that complicated nor hard to learn. A simple script can help you to save a lot of working effort. I’m starting to learn computer coding languages like C# and Python. And I registered for a Github account.
I enjoyed the Machine Learning workshop most. Before that, I thought that Machine Learning was a very high-level technology. Only the tech titans like Google, Apple or Tesla are working with it. But this workshop showed me that we can implement this technology to computational design with very simple scripting. The Lab challenges are challenging. They are selected by the masters of computational design. If our team can conquer it, that means we are certified to be Super Users of computational design.
Gloria Serra-Coch
I applied to the lab for two main reasons. For one, I am eager to participate in any effort inside CallisonRTKL to further our digital capabilities. I believe it is crucial for us to get better at this aspect for our profession in order to be able to move forward. Secondly, I believed it would be a great personal learning experience. In the same way, I am always looking for opportunities to learn new skills or technologies and to meet other people with a similar mindset that can help me expand my views. Already, I have learned the basics of machine learning and how it is applied to architecture. Coming to the digital shift from an urban planning background, I was lacking the knowledge on how some of the digital tools, coding or data is used for design. The workshops helped me further my understanding of this subject.
I believe the first workshop was the most striking for me– although part of it was the newness. I found it interesting to see some of the machine principles I had learned in urban planning applied to geometric and design challenges that I had never thought of. I am really excited to learn more about data-based design and how to connect it with the urban scale – where I usually work – and urban data analysis. I believe that if we were able to connect the dots between data-based urban planning and architecture we could unlock something very interesting and powerful.
Lingzhe Lu
I think the Lab is a great opportunity for me to share and learn computational design skills around the office globally—it’s important to know what other people are doing outside our office. I’ve enjoyed thinking from a developer’s perspective and realizing how many data visualization platforms have been developed in recent years. My favorite workshop was when we had the first team meeting with our advisor. We discussed our project intentions and shared a lot of resources and projects each person knew about and worked on. I think some of the most exciting challenges of the Lab are the short time period, working with new people and doing it all remotely.