Worldwide societal challenges confront us, related to e.g. climate change, the depletion of materials and fossil energy sources, a significant increase in the world’s population, and a strong wish for decent living standards for all. Besides, a large part of the existing housing stock should be renovated and attuned to changing demographics, and even more dwellings are needed, despite an existing high residential density. These challenges require an evolving built environment, with buildings that preferably harvest energy, are long-lasting, flexible in use, and follow cradle-to-cradle principles concerning material resources.
To evolve the built environment, artefacts can be directly improved via building performance analysis, and the application of digital twins, simulation, and optimisation, so computing. Equally important, artefacts can only emerge from designing, and so these processes should be pushed to new levels too, the expertise of design computing .
In the domain of structural design, which by its nature involves the domains of science, engineering, and design, the importance of computing and design computing promotes a dedicated field of research. This field embraces related research and education, which involves the modelling, simulation, and optimisation of structural design artefacts on the building scale, and equally important, their underlying design process: In short: Structural Design Computing (SDC).
For a popular presentation of Structural Design Computing, you may want to read these two English interviews (1) The AI Team and (2) The Computer as Architect; watch a video with a Dutch talk show: De artificiële bouwmeester; and listen to the Dutch podcast Kunnen we het maken?.