George Stiny

George Stiny teaches at MIT. He invented shape grammars in the late 1960’s and has been exploring their sweep in art and design ever since. He is the author of Pictorial and Formal Aspects of Shape and Shape Grammars, Algorithmic Aesthetics: Computer Models for Criticism and Design in the Arts (with J. Gips), and Shape: Talking about Seeing and Doing. In his recent book, Shapes of Imagination: Calculating in Coleridge’s Magical Realm (MIT Press, 2022), he tells how shape grammars subsume Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s imagination and fancy, and Oscar Wilde’s advice to see things as in themselves they really are not.