Past Events & Presentations

Monthly Program Highlights

SFCDI's meetups brought together practitioners from architecture, engineering, and construction to discuss emerging tools and techniques. Below is a selection of past sessions.

Community gatherings form the backbone of the San Francisco Computational Design Institute, offering a steady rhythm of monthly meetups where practitioners in architecture, engineering, and construction come together to share work and ideas. These sessions create space for both newcomers and seasoned designers to compare notes on visual programming, simulation, and emerging digital workflows. By keeping meetings open and regular, the Institute helps maintain a consistent pulse across a field that often feels fragmented between disciplines, tools, and studios scattered across the Bay Area and beyond.

Past programs at the Institute have explored a wide spectrum of computational topics, ranging from parametric modeling and generative geometry to optimization routines and data-driven design strategies. Speakers have approached their subjects from multiple angles, treating code as both a practical drafting instrument and a medium for speculative exploration. The result is a body of recorded sessions that functions as a living archive, giving members and visitors a way to revisit foundational concepts while staying alert to newer methods reshaping how buildings, products, and environments are conceived and documented.

Education is woven throughout the Institute's mission, extending beyond evening talks into workshops, demonstrations, and longer-format learning opportunities. Participants are invited to follow along with hands-on exercises that translate abstract ideas into working scripts, plug-ins, and node-based definitions. This pedagogical emphasis reflects a belief that computational literacy is becoming as essential as hand drawing once was, and that shared, low-barrier instruction is one of the most effective ways to broaden who gets to participate in shaping the built environment.

Collaboration sits at the heart of the Institute's identity, connecting independent practitioners, academic researchers, and industry partners under a common interest in computation. By convening people who might otherwise work in parallel, the organization encourages cross-pollination between firms, software communities, and design schools. The result is a more porous boundary between practice and research, where questions raised during a meetup can resurface weeks later in a workshop, a joint project, or a shared open-source contribution that benefits the wider design and engineering community.

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