noun
WebGL shader operators for DEM, GIS, remote sensing applications / visualizations.
Available soon: Curated snapshots, prints and drawings of unknown lands, real, procedural & simulated…
Our new Youtube channel features live streams in which we build projects from scratch with thi.ng, and also shorter tutorials...
Currently only being a spare time endeavour, streams will restart in December 2020. Visit stream.thi.ng for upcoming date(s)…
thi.ng is a truly manifold long-term project devoted to Computational Design. Not a framework, nor bound to any specific use case, environment or even language, it's a vast and mature set of complementing code libraries, which has organically grown to approx. 300 sub-projects, with at least half still being actively maintained. This site is a work in progress and so far merely a portal to these projects, though will ultimately serve as a comprehensive hub and archive of all related outputs. Only open source projects & educational resources are presented here. The confidential nature of my recent professional position still doesn’t allow me to share any recent work projects I was involved in.
Created and maintained by Karsten Schmidt since 2006, the project has been supported by a small group of wonderful contributors. Over the past 20 years, Karsten has produced and contributed to hundreds of open source projects, including Processing and Clojure. He has written about, lectured and taught computational design and is listed in the top 1% on Codersrank. His work has been exhibited internationally, incl. Barbican, Victoria & Albert Museum London, MoMA New York, Garage Moscow, Design Museum Holon, CAFA Arts Museum Beijing.
Originally, thi.ng was created to help realise Karsten's diverse work projects/commissions and experimental design research, forming an open toolkit we can grow and control as much as possible. Over the years, the conceptual scope has expanded dramatically. Early thi.ng projects began when Computational Design was still in its infancy. With only limited open source tooling in that domain available at the time, some of our projects were pioneering and helping to fill that niche and using these tools for teaching/evangelizing became other primary project goals. Altogether, an additional 200+ examples are bundled with the largest projects in the collection, with more being added regularly.
thi.ng is based on a bottom-up growth & design philosophy: small pieces with narrow scope and utility recombine to fulfil demands of ever changing use cases in similarly varied fields. Because of the wide scope, we're usually working on projects in a round-robin manner, based on feedback and loosely defined long-term goals, which may (and are encouraged to) shift over time. This has included large rounds of refactoring, adopting new languages, platforms or techniques and occasionally leaving others behind, once a project is in a stable condition. Some of the oldest projects here are still enjoying an active following, even after almost 10 years since their last official release...
One endeavor, hundreds of facets… This current site is a precursor of an ongoing effort to create a semantic graph of all projects, assets and relationships - a massive undertaking, which already spawned several new projects in the collection. Until ready, the following interactive tag cloud is an attempt to give a birdseye view of the subjects covered by various parts of the collection.
Show all 305 projects, use the fuzzy search box or click on a tag to explore and only show relevant projects. Multiple tags can be entered to further narrow the search results…
The current primary development focus is on data-driven, functional tooling for TypeScript and browser-based technologies. However, thi.ng overall aims at different programming approaches and languages, incl. Clojure, ClojureScript, C11, Houdini VEX. All projects share a common philosophy with an emphasis on composition, interop, simplicity, data transformation, introspection & visualization and use of powerful data structures. Most projects favor a mixture of functional and declarative designs over classic object-oriented approaches, though we fully embrace the target languages, strive to be undogmatic and embrace hybrid solutions where they make sense. Parts of the collection also focus on domain-specific languages and offer core infrastructure to help with their implementation.
Catalyzing learnings from earlier projects and languages used, and the primary focus for the past 5+ years, at least half of all thi.ng projects have been developed in TypeScript as part of the thi.ng/umbrella monorepo. With several of these projects in development since 2015, in early 2018 a decision was made to merge efforts & develop them further under a common umbrella. Although most of these packages are largely independent, they address a vastly wider set of topics with a more cohesive philosophy, shared infrastructure, types, interfaces, release cycles, examples, interlinked documentation etc.
Counting in at ~155,000 lines of code, documentation & diagrams and another ~25k SLOC of commented examples, most of the 500+ topics forming the above tag cloud are addressed by packages in this monorepo. With very few exceptions, no third party dependencies are used and all umbrella internal relationships are explicitly stated in each package's readme. All umbrella packages are released under the Apache Software License 2.0.
The heatmap timeline below gives an overview of the various packages and when they were added/included in the umbrella monorepo. The start dates shown here do not necessarily indicate project beginnings, only when packages were added & refactored in their current form.
Since early on, starting with toxiclibs in 2006, projects in this collection have been used across many fields & industries (and helped kicking off several startups), incl. architecture, product & interaction design, data visualization, digital fabrication, interior design, print-on-demand, medicine, branding, motion graphics/VFX, game development, audio production, art installations, etc.
Several projects in which thi.ng projects played a key role were nominated for & won international design prizes, incl. Cannes Lions, D&AD, Red Dot Design Award, British Designs of the Year, Lighting Design Awards, Type Directors Club Award, Media Guardian Innovation Award.
Education and usage as teaching tool have been equally important and long-running project goals. Over the years, many of our projects have been used in this capacity in various schools, universities, workshops and festivals worldwide. Karsten himself has been teaching dozens of workshops since 2008.
For project news, stream notifications & future workshops, please follow us on Twitter or subscribe to our low frequency newsletter!
Eternal gratitude to the following humans and organizations for supporting the ongoing development of these projects.
If you'd like to become a supporter yourself, please visit our GitHub sponsors or Patreon profile. Thank you very much!
Thanks to the following organizations for funding earlier development through commissions, collaborations, client work, lectures, workshops & consulting in the past:
