On Thursday, October 15, 2020 at 1:00pm, John Gero will present “Cognitive Design Computing: Including the Human Dimension” via Zoom.

Please RSVP to Jeff Fitton ([email protected]) to receive a Zoom invitation. This lecture is open to members of the Harvard community.

John Gero is a Research Professor in Computer Science and Architecture at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte. He was previously Professor of Design Science and Director the Key Centre of Design Computing and Cognition, University of Sydney. His software has been used in the design of over 200 buildings. He is the author/co-author of 54 books and over 700 published research papers and book chapters, with over 23,000 citations. He has been a visiting professor of architecture, artificial intelligence, civil engineering, cognitive science, computer science, design and computation, and mechanical engineering in France, Switzerland, UK and USA, including at MIT, CMU, Columbia, UC-Berkeley and UCLA. His recent research is funded by the NSF, DARPA and NASA. His former doctoral students are professors in Australia, Finland, India, Iran, Japan, Korea, New Zealand, Singapore, Taiwan, UK and the USA. He is Co-Editor-in-Chief of the international journal Design Science, Emeritus Editor of Computer-Aided Design and chair of the international conference series Design Computing and Cognition. His consulting clients include IBM, Xerox-PARC, Wells Fargo and the Australian Federal Government.

Cognitive Design Computing: Including the Human Dimension

Design computing has traditionally been concerned with representing the world through design heuristics, modeling building geometry or through the mathematical modeling of the physics involved with buildings or a combination of all three. In this it has been extraordinarily successful. With the increasing recognition that humans play roles in design, the paradigm based on these three approaches no longer applies universally, and a supplemental humanistic foundation is required. One foundation can be found in cognitive science, the study of the behavior and structures of the mind. One area of cognitive science, situated cognition, lends itself to models that include humans in designing and designed systems. This talk presents the foundations of situated cognition and abstracts them into a set of five principles for cognitive design computing. It then presents implementations of cognitive design computing.
The talk present examples of cognitive design computing, including:
• situated analysis of doors
• emergence of schools of style
• cognitive design components
The talk concludes with comments on the implications of cognitive computing.