INTERFACE PROJECTS

Human-centered interfaces from an interface-centered human:

Collaborative Utopia

Helping us work better together with a new digital tool for real-time creative collaboration and design.



CHALLENGE
Create a digital, multi-person tool for collaboration.

PROJECT
A series of Grasshopper scripts that allow multiple designers to quickly iterate and improve on a common design in Rhino, with built-in voting and chatting.
DETAILS
Columbia Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation (GSAPP)
Metatool
Dan Taeyoung, instructor
Yiyi Qi and Wen Zhou, team members
Fall 2015

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The Collaborative Utopia is a set of Grasshopper scripts for Rhino. The system uses new technologies to create a democratic and extensible project structure where multiple designers can simultaneously and successively contribute ideas, and vote on strategies to evaluate and evolve those design inputs. Taking advantage of new data sharing cloud services, multiple design inputs and votes can be consolidated and shared seamlessly. The Collaborative Utopia enables a rapid-fire, back-and-forth design charrette, where the goal is not the slow development of one scheme — a common drawback of traditional hierarchical or staggered project structures — but rather the quick generation of many ideas.

There are two distinct Grasshopper scripts in the Collaborative Utopia, one for each designer and one for a central server, linked together by shared streams of data and information. I focused on the development of the Internet-enabled connections between separate scripts using the Flux plugin, the projection of the user interface into the Rhino viewport, as well as the basic Grasshopper logic that collects and process submissions and votes by embedding in to the Rhino GUID-object metadata.

Video of tool in use, contributor Grasshopper file and server Grasshopper file.

Still curious? Check out some of my other work:


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︎    Get in touch: email, GitHub, LinkedIn.