Computational Design
2013-2017Unique projects from my university studies
java · rhino · python
Alex studies buildings!
At university, I studied Computational Design under the Built Environment at the University of New South Wales. I don’t use any (or much) of the skills I was taught during my studies, but it did end up revealing a whole new side of technology I had not experienced before.
Below are some of the noteworthy projects that inspired me to work towards web development:
HEXTIC
Sydney Architectural Festival 2014 installation at the Grasshopper Bar, fabricated with hexagonal prisms that reflect water ripples, with integrated LED lighting for visual effect and interaction.
A wall of hexagonal lit prisms, with choreographed lighting to echo the ways people move like water ripples. HEXTIC was an installation at the Grasshopper Bar in Sydney for the 2014 Sydney Architectural Festival.
The geometric form was computationally generated in 3D modeling software to simulate ripples across the physical array. I designed the lighting sequence that was driven by user interactions through a camera, transformed in Processing (Java), to be reflected in real time with the manufacturer’s lighting control.
Green Star Daylight Simulation
Building regulations can often be a blocker and limitation for design. But what if we could create a real-time workflow for designers to understand how their decisions impact the regulation criteria’s?
For my graduation thesis project, I developed a workflow to produce a 3D Voxel Daylight Simulation with a Green Star Lux analysis. The workflow was created with the 3D modelling software Rhino and Grasshopper (visual scripting), with simulation provided by the Honeybee plugin.
In 2016, I presented this research paper at the University of Melbourne at the Computer-Aided Architectural Design Research in Asia (CAADRIA) as a representative of my university.
