Design Scripting

ARCH 4833/7030/8833

Elective Course (MM3 Credit)

Instructor: Russell Newton

Spring 2025

Georgia Tech

Computer programming is nearly ubiquitous as a tool for problem solving and automation across many disciplines, from engineering to analytics, even to design. For architects and designers, computer programming can be used to create, explore, and evaluate design ideas.

Students in this course will progress from the basics of programming to advanced approaches in algorithmic design. By the end of the semester, students are expected to establish the fundamentals of computer programming and demonstrate control of computer programming as a facilitator of design.

How to use this website

This website is intended to be used as a companion to Georgia Tech’s Design Scripting class (ARCH 3844/7030/8833), taught by Russell Newton in Spring 2025. Much of the content and learning material of the course will be posted and distributed via this website. This way, it can be used as a reference when completing assignments, developing the final project, and any time in the future.

All other course material such as the syllabus, schedule, and announcements will be distributed through Teams.

Attendance Checks

Starting in Week 4, we will be doing attendance checks on CodingBat. These are custom problems that I have made to get you all thinking with Python.

To access the problems, go to my CodingBat account’s home page. Make sure you’re logged in to your account before solving!

Other Resources

In addition to this website, some other resources may be useful during this course:

• Rhino

• Grasshopper Primer by ModeLab (old, but helpful)

• Python Documentation (3.9, the version in Rhino)

• CodingBat Python

• Python Scripting in Grasshopper

• Grasshopper data trees and Python

• Rhino.Python Documentation

• RhinoCommon API

Intellectual Property Acknowledgement

Under the Georgia Institute of Technology Policy Library Section 5.4.3B:

Creators own copyrights to their scholarly and creative works, such as instructional materials, textbooks and associated supplementary material, books, journal articles, and associated Computer Software. GIT and GTRC retain a fully paid up, universe-wide, perpetual, non-exclusive, royalty-free license to use, re-use, distribute, reproduce, display, and make derivative works of all scholarly and creative works for the educational, research, and administrative purposes of GIT and/or GTRC.