Here’s a good video interview to Karsten Schmidt (aka toxi), a computational designer merging code, design, art & craft skills. He is famous for his toxiclibs project, an open source library collection for computational design tasks with Processing.
In this interesting interview Karsten Schmidt talks about the current state of design (graphic design and computational design) and its relationship with open source tools: software and coding are increasingly becoming important tools for designers (and they are changing the design discipline at the same time).

Computational Design from Mark Webster on Vimeo.

via | open architecture open design

After the post where I wrote about flocking algorithms used in a site-specific art/design installation by Todo Design, I ‘d like here to write about another experiment with such algorithms.

While surfing on Vimeo I found this video by Aaron Westre from Minneapolis (Minnesota, USA), where he explains very well his master’s degree thesis on using flocking algorithms in order to design 3D architectures; here’s the video:

Introduction to Complexity Machine 1 from Aaron Westre on Vimeo.

Moving between design, science and computation Aaron Westre developed his his own software (you can download it here), “Complexity Machine 1” using the open source software Processing, where he runs his behavioral simulation describing the rules of the agents.

What is interesting in this project, is that the complexity of a system is not used as just inspiration or decoration, but as whole different way to design a structure, as if it were designed or modeled by a flock of birds.
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code_swarm. An experiment in organic software visualization is an application created by Michael Ogawa with Processing, that gathers data about the history of an open source / free software community and visualizes it in a video. Here’s the video for the Python programming language:

code_swarm – Python from Michael Ogawa on Vimeo.

I’ve been studying software projects for a while now. Not the programming, but the people — the way they interact with each other through collaboration and communication.

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