M.S. Computational Design Practices

The Master of Science in Computational Design Practices (M.S.CDP) is an innovative program for recent graduates and practitioners that extends and integrates disciplines between architecture, data visualization, and urban planning—focusing specifically on computational design practices for the built environment at multiple scales. It aims to pioneer new concepts and pedagogies for an integrated multi-scalar and spatial approach to computational design at Columbia GSAPP. The M.S.CDP curriculum encourages critical and creative engagement with spatial computational design as both method and practice.

The M.S.CDP program was launched in 2021 for pre- and post-professional students and encourages applications from a range of backgrounds. The program is oriented toward the training of future design practitioners and aims to expand the discipline’s range of intellectual entanglements and cultivate new paradigms for scholarly research, experimental practice, creative technology, communication, and action. We take it as a given that from the scale of the project to that of the planet, the uses of computational design methods, and tools are most successful when their limits and their contexts—technical, social, political, aesthetic, and ethical—are confronted and surpassed to allow equitable ways of imagining, creating and coding space. The tools, data, and technology we deploy in the design process are never neutral. Faculty in the sequence take on discrete parts of this array—data visualization, sensors and data analysis, simulation, optimization, sensing, procedural modeling, rendering, interface design, Geographic Information Systems (GIS), Building Information Management (BIM)—and expose students to technical, critical, and creative ways to transform and develop their processes of design.