This site presents the final student projects from the course Creative Computation for Visual Communication Design, organised at the VCD MA programme at Aalto University School of Arts, Design and Architecture 22.10.—28.11.2024.
During the intensive, six-week course the students were introduced to the fundamentals of programming using JavaScript and the p5.js library. In addition to hands-on experiments with code, the course also provided theoretical and critical perspectives to computational practices in visual communication design.
The course projects presented here explore the concept of VARIATIONS. By adopting computational methods, designers and artists are able to generate an infinite number of variations on a theme. Rather than producing a fixed outcome, the computational designer delineates rules and parameters for endless possible outcomes. Like designer Karl Gerstner describes in his seminal collection of essays Designing Programmes from 1964: "Instead of solutions for problems, programmes for solutions." When the production of variations is automated, the work of a designer becomes sort of meta-design: Selecting and formulating the interconnected variables that make up the solutions. As Gerstner puts it: "The work is not diminished; merely transferred to another plane."