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On January 15, 2025, we delivered Original Ideas Inspired by Nature: Gaudí Origination Workshop (Natural Thinking Workshop) at UNIST, Ulsan. For four hours, 59 attendees-students and professionals from science, engineering, and design-explored the Origination Method through lectures, guided exercises, and AI tools to reimagine typologies such as police stations, commercial complexes, or sustainable housing. The hybrid face-to-face-online format allowed for real-time work with physical sketches and AI-generated renderings.
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Challenge
- An interdisciplinary workshop that showed how to integrate science, technology and art into sustainable solutions.
- A practical method that participants could apply without prior training in architecture.
- To demonstrate the potential of AI as a creative accelerator in academic contexts.
Initial student's exploration
Final, nature inspired idea
Solution
We applied the Origination Method (Origins → Humanism → Design → Sustainability):
- Initial Inspiration. Keynote with leaders in science, art and sustainability presenting real examples of the Origination Method and opening the conceptual framework of the workshop.
- Theory and context. Interactive presentation on biomimicry, biophilia and humimesis in Gaudi's work - how he transforms nature, history and human behavior into design principles.
- Exploration of origin. Each person analyzed a brief (typology + user person) to identify problems and opportunities, with first sketches connecting human needs and cultural roots.
- Guided research (principles of Humanism → Design → Sustainability). Structured search for natural, historical and usage references; diagrams and AI tools to extract formal patterns and ecological impact.
- Back to the origin and concept development. Back to early sketches to contrast with findings; integration of new ideas into a refined concept through sketching, labeling and AI visualization.
The approach allowed non-architects to generate functional and poetic proposals, much more inspired by nature.
