This course provides a strong foundation to learn and apply visual coding in CAD for design. Since computers became centrally important to design practice during the last several decades, the digitalization of design tools progressed from the imitation of traditional analogue tools, like drawing and modeling, to seemingly limitless possibilities afforded by a designer’s ability to code within CAD. Visual coding environments, like Grasshopper, were initially adopted to parametrically model and generate geometry through the composition of algorithms and have since greatly expanded a designer’s repertoire of digital design tools, including the ability to create custom tools, control CNC machines, and integrate artificial intelligence into CAD workflows. In the absence of physical material resistance, students will explore working with data through design exercises like a new kind of material with its own forms of resistance that are mathematical and computational. Algorithmic modeling requires new modes of creative thought. Through visual coding, design thinking increasingly overlaps with programmer thinking in patterns, associative relationships, loops, recursion, and conditionals in a dynamic environment. Students must possess working knowledge of modeling in Rhino, but familiarity with Grasshopper is not required. Students will acquire deep, yet essentially selective, knowledge in visual coding that is most useful to apply in design.