New Pedagogies: Computing, Cognition, and Syntax: Beyond Seeing, Doing, and Being

This interdisciplinary course investigates the intersections of computing, cognition, and syntax through the visual-perceptual, rule-based approach of shape grammars. The course delves into shape grammars in research, pedagogy, and practice in design fields (architecture, engineering, art), and its continued developments. The course offers foundational knowledge of historical methods developed in the field, while also exploring new directions and questions for contemporary applications of shape grammars in situated making practices (e.g. crafts, digital fabrication), embodied cognition, and robotics. Students will learn how to use shape grammars to analyze visual works, create computational descriptions, and generate meaningful outcomes of creative acts. The course covers the fundamentals of shape grammars through lectures, readings, discussions, hands-on exercises, and projects. It also explores new questions, critical perspectives, theoretical insights and potentials for shape grammars, and its ability (or inability) when it comes to analyzing, describing, and expressing what humans see, do, and experience.