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The Primer

A computational design primer

Learn the machinery of design by moving it with your hands.

Vectors, curves, noise, waves, networks — the ideas underneath generative and computational design, built up one piece at a time. Nothing here is a static diagram.

You're looking at one now — a flock, aligning

Created and designed by Hamidreza Rafizadeh

Start with Foundations See all chapters The Atlas The Constellations Bibliography

✦ move through the field — it's alive

The chapters

01 — 08

Vectors, transforms, curves, waves, noise, sampling and graphs — the pieces everything else is built from, plus a bonus on attractors. 7 sections + bonus.

Patterns & Tiling

Randomness, Voronoi, packing, tessellation, symmetry and Penrose — plus a bonus on the 2023 "hat" tile. 6 sections + bonus.

Cellular automata, L-systems, reaction–diffusion, differential growth, attractors and self-organization. 6 sections.

Agents & Swarms

Flocks, swarm intelligence, ant stigmergy, slime mold, self-building cities and the wisdom (and folly) of crowds. 6 sections.

Particle systems, rigid bodies, collision detection, soft bodies, and fluids. 5 sections.

Geometry & Structure

An overture on representations of geometry, then distance fields, iso-surfaces, meshes, subdivision, panelization, minimal surfaces, load paths and form-finding — plus a bonus on origami. Overture + 8 sections + bonus.

Parameters, constraints, objectives, search strategies, evolutionary search, and Pareto trade-offs. 6 sections.

An overture on learning itself, then embeddings, autoencoders and VAEs, diffusion, GANs, and transformers & attention. An overture + 5 sections.