Generative Design

Workshop Generative Design at the Institute Digital Communication Environments (IDCE)

Key data

ECTS points: 2 ECTS
Next start: July 2025
Duration: 1 Week
Teaching language: English
Place: Basel
Fee: CHF 900.–
Study mode: Fulltime

Online Application

Generative Design Event start: Dreispitz, Basel Online Application

As designers embraced the computer decades ago, the mouse became a crucial tool to implement one’s ideas in the digital domain. From the early 2000s, programming frameworks enabled artists and designers to express themselves and create their own tools, commonly referred to as creative coding. Since the 2010s, a new era of frameworks has taken advantage of web browsers’ increased speed and capability, utilizing the HTML5 Canvas element as a sandbox for interaction. With the help of one of those frameworks, p5.js, one can quickly get up and running to code motion graphics, interactive visuals for a website, custom tools with GUI elements, and much more! By using dynamic inputs such as mouse movements, random chance, or time of day, one can influence parameters controlling the design of images, shapes, typography, to name just a few. This exciting realm of infinite possibilities, where every rendering can be unique, is what we mean by generative design. In this workshop (intended for both absolute beginners and experienced coders alike), we shall dive right into key functions for generating forms and type, setting them into motion, allowing user interaction to influence them and design our own digital tools for visual communication. In this workflow, we shall explore live coding, using a custom environment, where one sees instantaneous visuals as the code changes. Therefore, we shall have to take it one small step further and make our sketches audio-reactive, just in case you plan to VJ on the weekend.

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Ted Davis is a media educator / artist / designer originally from the United States and based in Basel, Switzerland. Since 2010, he teaches interaction design and co-ordinates the UIC/HGK International Master of Design programme within the Institute Digital Communication Environments IDCE, HGK Basel FHNW. His work and teachings explore the volatility of digital media through glitch and reactivating older ‘new media’ through newer programming means. His open-source projects (basil.js, XYscope, P5LIVE, p5.glitch) enable designers to program within Adobe InDesign, render vector graphics on vector displays, collaboratively live code visuals with p5.js, and glitch any media in real-time within the web browser. In 2021, he received the Basel Media Art Prize (Basler Medienkunstpreis) for p5.glitch and was a Processing Foundation Teaching Fellow. With international exhibits, lectures, and workshops, he empowers students to take hold of the computer’s ability to design possibilities beyond that of the hand or mouse. teddavis.org

The Institute Digital Communication Environments (IDCE) offers workshops for students, educators and graphic designers.

The workshops afford insights into topical themes of visual communication for analogue and digital communication channels in a study programme reflecting the rich tradition of the Basel School of Design. Practical exercises with a high level of professionalism form the core of the workshops focus. Reflection as well as contextual knowledge will be conveyed by way of input sessions, allowing participants’ work to be judged within a contemporary, future-oriented context relevant to professional practice. The trinational Rhine River Valley is a unique cultural environment with easy access to France and Germany and to sites such as the Vitra Design Museum (G), the Isenheimer Alter (F), or Ronchamps (F). In Basel, the Fondation Beyeler, Tinguely Museum, Museum of Fine Arts, Schaulager, and Museum of Contemporary Art are world-renowned. Besides its museums, Basel offers a rich mixture of cultural events.

Institute Digital Communication Environments (IDCE)

Through digital media and the democratisation of communication channels that goes hand in hand with it, the critical handling of their visual and interaction-based design has become decisively more important, because the social relevance of information and communication has thus fundamentally changed.