The College of Design at the University of Minnesota has hosted a week-long Architecture as Catalyst event since 2010. Catalyst intends to bring new ideas, conversations, and expertise to the School of Architecture by inviting guests worldwide to run experimental workshops with graduate students and give public lectures on their work.

Recently, AI advancements have been making headway in various sectors, causing a global impact on every industry. Now, the disruption has reached the creative domain, where artists, architects, and designers alike have seen a surge of use cases with AI. In the domain of architecture, we are inundated with a plethora of tools that demonstrate the creative prowess of diffusion models and various machine learning algorithms. With such tools in hand, how do we as architects reframe our ways of thinking to sift through the chaos of machine design and formulate methodologies in control, refine outcomes, and ultimately establish AI as a co-creator of our ideas?

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Coordinated by Dingliang Yang, the University of Minnesota was joined by prominent names in the AI and architecture world, George Guida and Tim Fu.

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Course Objectives:

1. To familiarize with generative AI  tools in the context of design;
2. To engage with emerging 2D and 3D workflows and algorithm-aided computational design tools;
3. To develop complete AI design projects from concept to production.

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