Abstract:

Generative design is changing and revolutionizing the design procedures used in the fields of architecture and engineering (among others). Therefore, it is a movement that has to be considered from the educational and academic points of views.

Generative design breaks with the traditional design systems, based on interactive procedures where the design team decides the specifications of a concept and the computer just checks with iterations the result, and analyses in more detail the way that these specifications are chosen (what the design process is). As Lars Hesselgren described in his article “Generative design is changing the face of architecture” (2009): “generative design is not about designing the building, it is about designing the system that builds a building”. Thus, generative design elaborates the specifications as much detail as possible so that the system obtains the optimal solution by its own.

Hence, this design method has many benefits such as human efforts, human errors, time and economic savings, etc.

In addition, this new way of design affects directly on the development of other new scopes, for example, in the field of manufacturing and, specifically, in the additive manufacturing (colloquially called “3D printing”).

This approach, undoubtedly novel, is changing design paradigms and all the educational system (primary and higher education areas and universities) has to bring up to date their syllabus and do not remain on the sidelines.

In this paper, the implications of this new methodological design system in the educational field are analysed in depth, and the results of several years of work in the field of teaching these technologies at university levels, both undergraduate and postgraduate, are provided.

Keywords:

Generative design, Generative design methodology, Design procedures, Educational design system, Educational design procedures.