About

VAS is a platform for collaborative research on system and its application in design. Since it was first built in 2012, a numbers of systems have been researched as the strategical reference to optimal solutions for design problems found in practice of architectural design, landscape design, and urban design.

Computational Design as a new design paradigm has opened up a world of infinite possibilities in various design fields. By nature, data processing in computation is capable of bridging disciplines, allowing us to take the world as a place of multivalence. It is precisely for this interdisciplinary characteristic of computation that systems become essential to the new design paradigm.

Since the start of this new paradigm, designers have borrowed smart properties found in systems as design principles. It is what provides more or less intelligence or useful principles to design factors such as form, planning, structure, or even materiality. Formally, a system can be defined as a set of components to shape a whole and its properties have been seen in multiple fields of matters and organization range from nature, culture, society. The disciplines we have referred are limitless, including mathematics, chemistry, computer science, geography, and sociology, etc. Nature, for example in particular, has always been the best resource of inspiration for architects and is one of major sources in computational design. With natural science, for example, the use of computational technologies enables the development of biomimetic design, which has been established well as one of disciplinary branches in the field of architecture.

In our research, we start from learning those instances of system and extract their properties as seeds of ruled components to achieve respective design goal. Through this process, our task is thoroughly to provide readers with a variety of computational approaches in conjunction of both conceptual development and construction process. In any design phases, the process of design is a series of finding problem solutions and the choice of strategy itself defines the end result our design. We are hoping that this collaborative research can be of anyone’s help on finding alternative strategies for them to solve those problems in design and to start structuring its process.

Our VAS research was compiled as a series of lectures and computational design workshops held in Beijing in the year 2015 to 2019.

VAS is run by Tuning Synesthesia (tSynsth) - an interdisciplinary team of designers and engineers, designeers, dedicated to computational design in architecture to urban planning, with much emphasis on a sustainable identity in design and its development. The VAS research is started by Chie Fuyuki　(冬木千枝) and has been supported by all tSynsth members as well as her students in the past design classes and a series of workshops.

The research initially took the form of blogging and then presented through numbers of lectures. In 2016 a series of workshop on computational design (VAS) was held and in 2017, it was even extended further as collaborative installments of workshop with several universities and educational institutions in Beijing, China.

At last but not least, our website should ideally act as a bridge between technology, design, real life, and individuals from interdisciplinary fields. Any help from any of you will be much appreciative, in return we will endeavor making it as active as possible so your contribution to our website is worth both to you and society.

Should you have any inquiries, contact us at tsynsth@gmail.com or visit us at our website.