Generative Design - Visualize, Program, and Create with Processing

Every once in a while along comes some one or some thing exceptional. You have heard that expression: The sum is greater than the total of the parts.

Generative Design is such a book. It starts with the cover diagram which is a graphic of many colored bands, each of which represents a section of a book page and uses the section's colors, which have also been sorted by grade. The back cover of the book features a tag cloud. Processing is the open source visual design language and IDE by Casey Reas and Ben Fry, and this book, and the downloadable examples, including cover.pde, will certainly inspire.

The books approach is interesting. There are six introductory sections on how to use the book. Then there are thirty five project selections from the world of art and architecture. Then there are six complex methods that teach processing. Finally there is an appendix, which is a reflexion, a summary of the authors thoughts about the changing processes that a generative design has to offer.

The publisher is Princeton Architectural Press. The website is http://www.generative-gestaltung.de/. The works range from architecture to typography to illustration to computer science to data science to art.

The book can provide a complete programming course in the processing language and IDE. Starting from the beginning:

one can progress all the way to complicated data structures

and force directed layouts:

While Hadoop, R and Python are the usual staples of the data scientist, and processing is the more the province of the artist, information is information and a tool is a tool. The job is to help the user to understand, and anything that can get the point across is an aid to the job. Processing can join Hadoop, R, Python, D3, ggplot, matplotlib, and a whole host of others. Generative Design is a real aid to helping to use processing in the design process.