We are excited to announce that the next VCD technical session will be by Thomas Gaudin on May 7th in Structurecraft’s Vancouver office.

Thomas Gaudin has worked as a professional computational designer for a decade, first at Patkau Architects and now at StructureCraft. He has taught computational design at the University of British Columbia for 7 years. He only recently figured out what computational design actually is and is now wondering if AI will take his job.

A computational designer is not someone who applies logic to a design problem. That's just a logical designer. In this lecture, Thomas draws on foundational computer science (SICP), Shape Grammars, and — yes — knitting, to build a working definition of what computational design actually is and what a computational designer actually does. Using insights from developing Physalia, an open source LLM-driven Grasshopper plugin, Thomas argues that AI tools, used properly, expand rather than replace the practice he is advocating for.