From May 6–8, 2026, Kova PedSim was part of Designing with Living Systems, an online workshop hosted on Zoom by McNeel Europe. The three-day workshop brought together computational design, environmental simulation, ecological modeling, and socially driven pedestrian simulation into a shared design framework for Rhino and Grasshopper.
Led by Mariusz Hermansdorfer, Puja Bhagat, Jonathan Wong, Eleftherios Kourkopoulos, Jens Joschinski, and Verena Vogler, the workshop introduced participants to a series of simulation-based workflows for understanding how spatial decisions influence urban environments over time.
Rather than treating buildings, landscapes, climate, vegetation, and people as separate systems, the workshop focused on their interdependence. Participants explored how design scenarios could be evaluated through multiple lenses: microclimate performance, ecological development, and pedestrian experience.
A Multi-System Approach to Urban Design
The workshop was structured around three complementary simulation systems: jifto, a real-time sustainability analysis plugin for Rhino, introduced participants to microclimate as an active design driver.
Rhino.Ecologic, developed by Verena Vogler, Eleftherios Kourkopoulos, and Jens Joschinski at McNeel Europe, provided a framework for modeling ecological processes such as plant growth, competition, succession, biodiversity, and biomass.
Kova PedSim, developed by Puja Bhagat and Jonathan Wong, introduced socially driven pedestrian simulation as a way to evaluate how people move through, occupy, and experience space under changing spatial conditions.
Together, these tools demonstrated how Rhino and Grasshopper can support a more integrated approach to simulation-led design, where environmental conditions, ecological processes, and human behavior are connected within a single computational workflow.
Day 1: Designing with Microclimate
The first day focused on microclimate analysis using jifto, developed by Mariusz Hermansdorfer, former Head of Computational Design at Henning Larsen. Participants explored how thermal comfort, solar exposure, shadow behavior, seasonal variation, wind, and radiation can inform architectural and urban design decisions. The session emphasized the importance of bringing environmental analysis into early-stage design, where geometry is still flexible and simulation feedback can meaningfully influence the direction of a project.
Rather than using sustainability analysis only as a post-design validation tool, the workshop demonstrated how real-time environmental feedback can become part of the design process itself.
Day 2: Ecological Simulation in Design
The second day introduced Rhino.Ecologic, an ecological simulation framework for Rhino and Grasshopper. Participants worked with voxel-based spatial modeling to translate design geometry into an ecological domain. From there, environmental parameters such as soil, solar exposure, and precipitation were used to simulate plant communities and long-term ecological development.
The session explored how ecological outcomes such as biomass, biodiversity, growth, competition, and succession can be measured and compared across design scenarios. This allowed participants to think beyond static landscape representation and instead engage with landscape as a dynamic, evolving system.
Day 3: Social Simulation and Pedestrian Dynamics
The final day focused on Kova PedSim and the role of human behavior in spatial simulation. The session introduced the foundations of agent-based and socially driven pedestrian modeling, covering three simulation approaches within Kova: network-based movement, cellular automata, and physics-based simulation. Participants explored how each system can be used at different scales to evaluate movement, density, interaction, congestion, and spatial performance.
A key focus was the importance of treating pedestrian behavior as more than simple pathfinding. Socially driven simulation considers how people respond to one another, how density affects movement, how congestion emerges, and how spatial configurations influence collective behavior over time. For Kova, this workshop was an opportunity to position pedestrian simulation alongside environmental and ecological modeling as part of a broader living systems approach to design.
Toward Simulation-Led Design Workflows
One of the central themes of the workshop was that design decisions rarely affect only one system. A shaded plaza may improve thermal comfort, influence planting strategies, change pedestrian dwell patterns, and alter how people move through a site. Similarly, vegetation growth may reshape comfort, visibility, accessibility, and patterns of occupation over time.
By connecting microclimate, ecology, and pedestrian dynamics, the workshop encouraged participants to think of simulation not as a final check, but as a design medium. This approach is especially important in urban environments, where climate adaptation, biodiversity, comfort, and human experience are deeply interconnected. Computational design tools can help make these relationships visible, measurable, and actionable.
A special thank you to McNeel Europe for hosting the workshop, and to Verena Vogler, Eleftherios Kourkopoulos, Jens Joschinski, Mariusz Hermansdorfer, Puja Bhagat, and all participants who contributed to the discussions across the three days. For Kova PedSim, it was a pleasure to contribute to a workshop that brought together such a rich mix of expertise around environmental performance, ecological thinking, and human-centered spatial simulation.
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