Computational design is a discipline that empowers designers to reimagine architecture through coding. It offers a new literacy to explore fresh design spaces and develop innovative solutions to existing challenges. Computation allow designers to reframe architecture from the static to the dynamic; it allows designers to harness data, connect disciplines and build collaborative workflows that cross boundaries between fields of expertise. Core to WilkinsonEyre’s philosophy is the bridging of art and science, poetry and engineering. Computational thinking is a creative design force that allows intuitive processes to enter into a dialogue while retaining rigor and structure. At best, it allows designers to sculpt with code, to tune, to balance, to create rhythms through designs drawing equally on art and mathematics.

Computation allows the interrogation of design, to ask questions and to get answers, to build responsive dashboards with feedback mechanisms. Computational design tools make it easier to simulate building performance through the design process. Examples can be structural performance to weight ratio, material performance, environmental performance, amount of embedded carbon and other factors. It could also be analysis of curvature or planarity or panels, sun angles or quality of views out. To know how much daylight can be expected on a sunny day in March? A tool can be created that measures this.   Within this paradigm, design is informed by analysis and - more excitingly - computation means embedding analysis into design. Design and simulation can enter a dialogue and the feedback loops allow rich and more informed design journeys.  Computation allows the generation of sophisticated forms that can be translated into buildable components and setting out data to be delivered to fabricators. This approach allows designers to embed material and fabrication considerations into their design logic.