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Generative Gestaltung book with the overview page open

Portrait of Markus Turber
Markus Turber

04.02.2010

Generative Gestaltung – Book Release

„I am very proud to announce the latest book of our two fellows Benedikt Groß and Hartmut Bohnacker. Besides of the great approach to generative design and step by step instructions for coding – This is one of the most beautiful books I have seen for a long time.”
Markus Turber

The term Generative Design describes a design method which is implemented in various design fields (Art, Architecture, Communication Design, Product Design). Thereby the most essential is that the output – image, sound, architectural models, animation – is generated by a set of rules or an algorithm.

A book focused on the designer’s point of view

About 2,5 years ago Julia Laub and me got together as we were thrilled by the possibilities of this domain. We decided to use our Diploma (Generative Systems) to dive into its essentials and its underlying algorithms. A year later Hartmut Bohnacker and Claudius Lazzeroni teamed up and with the help of Verlag Hermann Schmidt we were finally able to share our thoughts and findings with the rest of the world in form of a book. »Generative Gestaltung« tries to focus especially on the designer’s point of view: the creation of images and visualisations by using code.

Visualizing ideas by using code

Image are no longer created manually but through a visual idea which is translated into rules and then implemented in a programming language in the form of source code. The result is a piece of software which hopefully creates the desired images or even permutations. To cut a long story short: design is created by coding software instead of using software. Sounds a bit abstract, hu? So what can actually be done with? Here a few possible fields of application and a related best practice examples.

  • Information Visualisations: Eigenfactor
    Eigenfactor is a interactive visualizations to explore citation patterns between scientific journals. The goal is „to map the structure of science“.
  • Corporate Design: okdeluxe
    Generative identity for COP15 the United Nations Climate Change Conference held in Copenhagen in 2009. The logo Consists of 192 lines, one pr. member of the United Nations, conceiving the concept of „a world in continuous dynamic chaos unifying to the ideal constellation – a state of perfect balance“.
  • Art & Photography: Extracts of local distance
    Existing architectural photography are merged into multilayered shapes. The resulting collages introduce a third abstract point of view next to the original ones of architect and photographer.
  • Rapid Prototyping / Fabbing / Fabrication: Reflection
    Reflection is a CNC-milled sound data sculpture, inspired by a musical piece by Frans de Waard.

Transforming signals and noise into information and knowledge

My motivation (as one of the authors of Generative Gestaltung) was to provide a solid foundation for others on how this modified design process can be used. Or in other words to empower people to do projects like the ones above.

Because still a lot of designers think that coding is geeky and complicated stuff. But in my opinion it’s a powerful tool that fuels creative solutions and will help us to solve future problems. Generative Design will become more and more important in order to turn the growing numbers of signals and noise into useful information, knowledge and great user experience.

A foundation to build upon

Last but not least you can get the complete source code as we’ve made it available under an Open Source License. You can grab them from the website that supports the book. We would be glad if you let us know of your experiments, ideas and explorations that might arise from our little seeds.

Generative Gestaltung
Designing, Programming, Visualizing with processing
Hartmut Bohnacker, Benedikt Groß, Julia Laub, Claudius Lazzeroni (Ed.)
publishes by Verlag Hermann Schmidt Mainz
ISBN 978-3-87439-759-9

www.generative-gestaltung.de