Democratizing the Designer's Toolbox Adopting Free, Open-Source, and Platform-Agnostic Tools into Computational Design Teaching

This paper proposes a computational design education approach where students learn to develop their own geometric and logical workflows beyond specific software and platform. The course's objectives are to familiarize architecture students with computational geometry, foster computational thinking that stays relevant over time, and promote democratized design tools through computation. Over a semester, we taught students to work directly on coordinates or numerical representations by utilizing 3-Dimensional (3D) computer graphics programming rather than learning 3D modeling software that rapidly goes out of style. This paper outlines our teaching methods to introduce the technology stack, design algorithm development, open-source or free tools implementation, and user experience - interface design. This paper also reviews the student's final projects to deliver interactive web-browser applications for architectural design of varied scales and compares them according to four evaluation parameters. The paper culminates with the project's critical assessment and students' feedback to evaluate our approach and suggest an outlook for future development.