On April 21, Flocc will be presented to students, faculty, and staff within the CodeLab research group at Carnegie Mellon University School of Architecture. This event is supported by the Computational Design Workshop series led by Daniel Cardoso Llach and Eddy Man Kim. Due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, the talk and workshop will be held over Zoom by signup only. Find more information below:

Computational Design Workshop: April 21, 2019 - 5 - 7:30pm @ Zoom

Agent-Based Modeling: The Art & Science of Emergence

Agent-based modeling is a computational technique for simulating complex systems such as ecologies, physical systems, epidemics, and societies. Rather than striving for predictive power, agent-based modeling powerfully illustrates the phenomenon of emergence — the whole of the system being greater than the sum of its parts — as when water particles form a hurricane, or a crowd of people becomes a riot.
In this workshop, participants will be introduced to agent-based modeling through Flocc, a JavaScript-based library. Using circulation around an architectural site as a case study, we will explore how to code rules for agents navigating their environments and observe the resulting behavior. On top of the agents themselves, we will also add data visualizations that provide another view of the emergent patterns. Finally, we will discuss how the outputs of Flocc programs can be used in other software, such as Processing or Grasshopper.