Course
20.224 Artificial & Architectural Intelligences in Design
Instructor
Immanuel Koh
Course Description
This course bridges the widening conceptual void faced by today’s architects and designers who are urgently in need of a theoretical framework to critically engage with a newly emerged design material—artificial intelligence, or more specifically, machine learning and deep learning. Thus, it speculatively straddles between the field of artificial intelligence and intelligent architecture, to make potential epistemological connections. The course begins by tracing the fascinating and intertwined genealogies of both fields from the 1940s onwards. This history is vividly brought forth to the present with complementary readings on AI aesthetics, AI artists and other emerging AI design topics, such as adversarial-based design algorithms, post-truth redesign of visual culture, unsolicited algorithmic cultivation of collective design tastes, and the territorial politics of computer vision-based surveillances. In addition to the textual ‘critical writings’, students also work in groups to communicate their visual ‘critical designs’.