The Digital Design Process - Reflections on a Single Design Case

CAD tools are increasing their expressive and geometric power to enable a design process in which the computer model can be used throughout the whole design process for realizing the design. Such a process, in which other media such as physical scale models or drawings are no longer required by necessity to facilitate the design process, can be considered a digital design process. Rather than proposing that such a process is ideal – drawings and scale models should not be discarded – we feel that when taken as a starting point, the digital design process raises a number of new challenges to architectural design that deserve attention. These challenges concern the basic activities in design: exploration of the problem space, creating preliminary solutions, understanding consequences of design decisions, and so forth. In this paper we take the concrete design case of a graduation project that was developed from the start solely in CAD. We identify a number of key issues in that process such as continuous modeling, the model as design, continuous pliability, localized focus, and postponed decision. These issues not only have a technical, CAD-related aspect, but also are connected to architectural design. Most of these aspects are subject of contemporary debate in architectural design. On this basis, we can indicate where CAD is making a potential difference in architectural design