Collaborative Digital Design When the architect meets the software engineer

Abstract

Increasingly more architects use programming as a means for form finding and design exploration, a tendency that is expected to continue. Even though significant progress has been made in the simplification of programming languages, complex design tasks might still require large coding efforts. We do not think it is wise to force architects to also become experts in programming languages and software engineering. Instead, similarly to what happened with other design and building disciplines, we think that the future of digital design lies in the collaborative effort of architects and software engineers. In this paper we analyze different situations where such collaboration increases productivity and frees the architect to more creative tasks.