Acknowledgments

Were I to follow my own recommendations in this research, there would exist some script to automatically generate and simulate these written acknowledgments. Instead, what follows is a decidedly non-computational expression of my gratitude.

First and foremost, thanks belongs to my advisor Daniel Cardoso Llach, who welcomed me into this program, provided research opportunities, and encouraged and guided me throughout the thesis process (not to mention shaping, through his own work, much of the theoretical background here). My thesis committee members also deserve thanks. Molly Wright Steenson drew my attention to cybernetic discourses in architecture and design, as well as highlighting pedagogical models relevant to the computational design thinking framework. And Stuart Candy helped shape my view of simulation in the context of futuring, as an exploratory, speculative design method.

This thesis also could not have been completed without the cooperation of the various people I interviewed, whose work has been deeply inspiring and central to the ideas I put forward here. In addition, the participants in the various design workshops I conducted helped shape the case studies in the Generating and Simulating chapters.

I thank my peers in the M.S. Computational Design program: Javier Argota, Adie Al-Nobani, Camille Baumann-Jaeger, Hetian (Darcy) Cao, Cecilia Ferrando, Atefeh Mahdavi Goloujeh, Yuqian Li, Yingxiu Lu, Rachael Tang, and George Zhu, for their collegiality and support. In particular, I’m grateful for attending ACADIA 2016 with Javier, Camillie, and Cecilia, and to Atefeh for being my partner in conducting the design workshop I describe in the Simulating chapter (I especially look forward to Atefeh’s upcoming thesis on participatory simulations). Outside of my cohort, I appreciate conversations in and around the CodeLab with Ardavan Bidgoli, Pedro Veloso, Harshvardhan Kedia, Ian Friedman, and others, as well as with Dan Taeyoung of Columbia GSAPP.

I’m grateful to my parents, Pam Parker and William Donaldson, for putting up with (and usually supporting) my many shifts, from mathematics to art in undergrad, from web development to architecture, and now to computational design. I can’t promise that the future will be any more linear, but I look forward to sharing it with them.

Finally, this thesis is dedicated to my wife and enduring partner, Lisa Otto, who has been my greatest supporter personally and emotionally (and whose own design research and ideas have and continue to contribute to my intellectual growth). Lisa, I look forward to designing our future together.