![]() However, the engineers have something the tool does not have their experience and engineering judgement. On the contrary, the design automation tool must mitigate the weaker point of the engineers, which is quickly and repeatedly performing the same computations without making any mistakes. This is an important part of my tool, as the goal of the design automation tool is not to replace the engineer. This statement was also confirmed during the interviews I conducted with breakwater designers, as the interviewees frequently explained their design process by using examples from other projects. The main design philosophy behind the tool was based on Lawson and Dorst (2005) who explained the importance of experience in a design process, as experienced engineers intuitively and immediately performs the necessary design steps. So my breakwater tool is not the first tool, but it is the first tool available under an open-source license. Design automation in open-source tools Integrating the tool And when engineers use these tools in their design processes, they can later provide students and universities again with feedback that can be implemented in the design tool, starting the process of continuous development. This way the entire engineering community is enabled to use their tools. This can for example be done by sharing tools on a platform like GitHub, or alternatively on a dedicated GitHub to engineers. It is of great importance that universities encourage their students to open-source their code and tools for this purpose. If this is a success, existing tools can become digital building blocks for the development of new tools later. Open-source tools for continuous development By having the students and researchers from these institutions share their code and tools under an open-source license, their impact can be compounded and a process of continuous improvement that has not been made possible before can be started. These institutions are based on democratising knowledge. Keeping this in mind, the best place to start open-sourcing tools seemed to be the universities and applied universities. Their main goal is not to win tenders, but on the contrary, their main goals is to progress and develop knowledge. Instead, I will focus on students and universities for this project. Because of that, I will not be focusing on companies from now on. Sharing your tool can by many be perceived as giving your competitors the same advantage as you have. I understand that for companies it is difficult to share their parametric design tools, especially when the tool helped them to win a tender. The main challenge: open-source design tools Where to start open-sourcing tools? This is not only unfortunately time consuming, but also prevents the continuous improvement of such tools. This meant that instead of using and further developing an existing tool, I needed to develop my own tool from scratch. Ironically, this is precisely the challenge the construction industry faces as well. There are several (parametric) design automation tools in existence, but unfortunately none of those were available as open-source tools. This was the main problem I encountered during my research. ![]() However, this tool has to be available first. One way to do this is by using a (parametric) design automation tool. Because time is of the essence, more concepts need to be explored within the same timeframe. Design automation is defined as automating (part of the) design process to make it less time demanding. For my graduation I researched the applicability of design automation for the breakwater design process.
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