Computational Studies on Cultural Variation and Heredity

Ji-Hyun Lee is an Associate Professor at the Graduate School of Culture Technology in KAIST. She received her Ph.D. in School of Architecture (Computational Design) at Carnegie Mellon University writing a thesis about integrating housing design and case-based reasoning. Since joining the GSCT at KAIST, her research focus narrowed down to three interdisciplinary areas that are not mutually exclusive: (1) calculation for UX + service design, (2) cultural DNA with morphological analysis, and (3) computational creativity. These explorations result in computer-based frameworks or systems contributing to the enhancement of the calculability using algorithmic and/or heuristic computational methods. In other words, her research focus is on 'computational culture' as an extension of computational design. ​

• THEME 1 Theories for Cultural DNA Research.- a) Research for Cultural DNA in Design.- b) A Design Gallery System.- c) Underlying Principles and Emerging Designs Based on Magic Squares.- THEME 2 Analysis & Synthesis of Cultural DNA at Urban Scale.- a) Multi-leveled Tridimensional Public Place and Urban Promenade.- b) Fingerprint of the City: How Old Country Roads become Fossilised within the Modern City.- c) Mods, Hacks, Makers: Crowdsourced Culture and Environment.- THEME 3 Analysis & Synthesis of Cultural DNA Artifacts.- a) How to Let Computers Know Building design Rules? - A KBimCode Mechanism to Translate the Sentences in Korea Building Act for the Automated Code.- b) A sense of dichotomy in household space and smartphone.- c) The Need for a Cultural Representation Tool in Cultural Product Design.- d) User Defined Conceptual Modeling Gestures.- e) A Universal Basic Robot.- THEME 4 Grammar-based Cultural DNA Research.- a) Paperless Grammars.- b) A practical shape grammar for Chinese ice-ray lattice designs.- c) Structures in shapes: a perspective from rules and embedding.- d) Grammatically Measuring the Functional Uniqueness of Murcutt’s Domestic Architecture.