Form Follows Code

Form Follows Code explores the synergy between a variety of design principles (architecture, fashion, product, data visualization, motion, graphic design) and computational methods and how these are shaping the way designers practice design, but also how people perceive and interact with the designers outcome.

Inspired by biological procedures, generative design is a design methodology in which the design instances (image, sound, form etc) are created automatically by a set of rules or an algorithm. It is a fast method of exploring design possibilities providing designers with the ability of modeling not only the form of the artefacts but also the process that will produce those artefacts.

Focusing on the concept of Form, we examine computational design through a variety of creative coding platforms such as Processing and OpenFrameworks. The outputs are both poetic and practical, esteemed for their data interpretation capabilities as well as their aesthetic merits. Each design instance takes advantage of common input devices and sensors found in ubiquitous computing environments, such as cameras or microphones, and human generated data and meta-data associated with them.

What ‘generative design’ actually designs are algorithmic processes. Compared with the methods of common design, computational design pushes conventional approaches to more adaptive processes, harness human creativity and allows for new social-technological orders to emerge.