Generative Design: What Is It and How Will It Transform Our Industry?

Generative design has massively changed the role that architects and engineers play in the process of creating buildings and products. For hundreds of years, our role was to aim for the most optimal result through creating numerous iterations and rapid prototyping. Not only did this process require significant resources, time, budget, worker power, and so on, but it also almost always resulted in the "better" version—but not the "most optimal" one. Through generative design, our role has shifted from creating design iterations to creating algorithms that then are used by the machine—which has significantly more computing power—to generate design iterations, and, later, provide options from which we can choose optimal results. In this lecture, we will talk about the foundations of generative design, the latest tools and technologies, our role in this new ecosystem, and how to define a company culture that supports this new environment.