Overview

For your final assignment in this class, you’ll design, develop, and share your own tool or application that showcases how parametric design, optimization, or generative design can be applied to an engineering problem of your choice.

The key idea is to develop your tool in such a way that you can share it with a community of colleagues who will be able to use or build upon your work for their own designs easily and efficiently.

What Kind of Tool or App Should I Create?

We’re using the term “tool” in a very broad sense. For our purposes, it can be anything that would be useful to another designer or user as they make design choices and decisions.

To be truly useful and convenient, you’ll want to create something that can stand alone. It should be:

Easily transferred – so other users can download it and apply it to their own projects.
Robust and reliable – it should work reliably within expected ranges of inputs and restrict users (or when them) to stay within the expected ranges.
Well-documented – you won’t be there to guide users through the specifics of using your tool. So, it should be well documented externally (for users who want to apply it without digging into the internal logic) as well as internally (for users who want to dive in and step through the nodes to explore ways they might adapt it to better fit their needs).

Some types of tools that you might consider developing include:

a Configurator Tool – that uses underlying rules to produce valid configurations for specified inputs. An example would be a tool that helps build up (or decompose) a design using standard sizes or configurations that can be easily manufactured off-site. So, you “configure” a design using available choices. Check out this page for another example of a Configurator Tool that configures Structural Frames for Variations of a Rectangular Building.
a Design Assistant – that provides useful feedback or recommendations that assist designers in evaluating the impact of potential options as they make design decisions. An example would be a tool that helps layout and place structural framing elements based on different inputs to guide the bay sizes or floor-to-floor heights. The tool could “assist” a designer by providing feedback about the weight of the structural materials or the carbon footprint for the inputs currently being considered.
a Generative Design Study – that evaluates a range of options for varying inputs and presents the results in a graphical way that helps designers identify the alternatives that best meet the desired criteria. You could expand on the study you created for Module 7 in many ways – adding inputs, defining new evaluation metrics, or refining the logic of your model – or create an entirely new study that looks at another design problem that you’d like to explore.

How Should I Get Started?

Here’s our recommended approach:

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Part 1 — Design

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Part 2 — Implementation

Final Thoughts…

Sound intimidating? It doesn’t have to be! The important thing for our class is that you’re exploring how parametric design tools can be applied in a domain that’s meaningful to you.

Think of your initial exploration (for this project) as the seed of a potentially much grander or ambitious effort to apply parametric design tools in truly impactful ways.

For this project, you’ll be creating a first prototype or proof-of-concept -- just enough to test the concept and illustrate how it would work. In other words, a so-called “minimum viable product”.

Don’t be intimidated by this open-ended prompt. Rather, think of this as an opportunity to define your own exploration of a design space that is really interesting to you.