Toolmaking for Digital Morphogenesis

In this paper we give a comprehensive account of the ongoing design and the highly interdisciplinary implementation and application work related to a voxel automata system for digital form finding. The objective of this project is to facilitate investigations primarily into various strategies of spatially self-organisational cellular form finding principles in generative design and architecture. We describe our research approach, project background, the system’s control and coding logic, spatial constituents and geometric features, decentralised parametric design support and some early applications and results in form finding and design education. We conclude with an outlook on a number of possible future system extensions that appear interesting and useful from our research perspective.