Design exploration supported by digital tool ecologies

Designers take advantage of tool ecologies in order to find the most purposeful way of connecting often distinct processes that inform morphological design and associated building performance feedback. The ability to set up logical connections of design parameters across different digital applications becomes ever more relevant in a time where the proliferation of computational tools has led to a fundamental transformation in architectural education. Morphological exploration and form-finding get increasingly enriched by environmental performance feedback. This paper points out a major step forward in software interoperability and the alignment of digital design applications, allowing users to engage with morphological form-finding enriched by real-time physical building performance feedback. The key innovation presented here relates to tools available to designers who neither possess in-depth programming skills, nor need to rely on custom-developed scripts in order to advance their concepts. A recent architectural design studio serves as a testbed to interrogate the level of convergence among tools for morphological design and performance optimization.