Designing with Coding Agents

I have a new course that Im teaching at Type@Cooper this June! It's called "Designing with Coding Agents" and here's the description:

Every tool has its own grain. A brush favors gestures, a grid favors order, and a coding agent favors conversation. Each changes what it means to author something.

In this workshop, students use a coding agent as a creative collaborator to write JavaScript and p5.js sketches. Week one, you make a word move. Week two, you build a tool that manipulates letterforms. Week three, your body becomes the input.

Whether you've written code before or not, this course serves as an introduction to coding agents. It treats the agent as a new kind of design tool: one worth understanding, questioning, and making your own.

This course is an outgrowth of what I've been exploring in both my practice as an artist and an educator. In Generating, Generative Typography, I started to imagine what my current lessons and teaching strategies had to gain from the introduction of llms and coding agents. In this course I am taking it a step further and have built the entire lesson plan around these new tools. The goal is to create a space where code can more easily become a tool for designers. It is an attempt to teach through the shift that we are living through. An attempt at expanding who can be creative with code.

Register here

-Mello

P.S. -

Here is the source image on the left and here is the source image on the right.