Geodesign: Geospatial Technology for Design

Catalog description

Interactive geodesign and digital design studio. LARCH 450 Geodesign: Geospatial Technology for Design (3) This course addresses the role of continually evolving information technologies in landscape architectural research and practice by reference to long legacy of theoretical contributions from the field that have sought to reconcile and benefit from integrating the sciences of society and environment with art, design, and planning. This interactive digital design course is an advanced geodesign methods and principles class that applies digital tools to landscape research, modeling, analysis and design. This course presents a digital process for analyzing, managing, and ultimately designing landscape systems by allowing students to inventory, analyze and evaluate complex spatial datasets. Students will learn to critically evaluate and implement the interplay between various factors and design alternative futures. Lectures will introduce key geodesign principles and techniques. The goal is to investigate an array of geospatial software as a powerful design tool in a broad and integrated manner for all the activities of the landscape architect, designer, planner and architect. Using a variety of geospatial and digital tools, students will develop a process to study, analyze, and plan landscape systems. They will utilize activities from each lesson to develop primary and alternative strategies for their proposed project. The problem-based approach used by this course will encourage cross-cultural contexts for student projects. Geospatial design computing technology enables many alternate approaches to problem-solving, so that students will customize their own learning experiences within the concrete structure of the course. This course brings advanced geospatial and digital analysis and evaluation into the design process, where concepts and ideas are vetted for suitability against a wide array of physical and social, place-based information. This on-the-fly suitability analysis provides a framework for design, giving landscape architects, architects, land-use planners, and others involved with design the tools to directly leverage geospatial information within their design workflows.