Programming Design Systems

Rune Skjoldborg Madsen’s Programming Design Systems is a graduate course focused on the intersection between graphic design and code.

The course fuses an exploration of: graphic design principles, including form, colour and typography; and computational principles, including randomization, repetition and transformation. As Madsen puts it:

Students write software that abstract design theories into code, printing the output on paper for design critique.

The course includes required reading that collectively covers the history of: graphic design (Josef Muller-Brockmann, Paul Rand…); computation (Vannevar Bush, Douglas Englebart…); and ‘everything in between’ (Sol Lewitt, Edward Tufte…).