Mikkel Esrup Steenberg leads computational design team at Henning Larsen Architects and talks about computational design tools can help democratize access to daylighting knowledge.

Steenberg commences with a global challenge: In 2050, 70% of the world's population will live in cities, meaning we have to build a new city with a capacity of 1.5 million people every week. Further, the AEC industry is responsible for 30-40% of the global CO2 emissions.  According to Steenberg, to change our behavior as an industry and start to do better in the world, we need to use new tools, and change our methods, to do it. Steenberg sketches their approach, which is a combination of a client’s wish and local guidelines, which are then visualized through their computer and showcases a plethora of possible solutions that can also be sorted according to their “performance”. He comments that all the different simulations seen in today’s presentation are actually running on a studio laptop through which they lose a little bit of accuracy, but it is part of the design process. There is also always the option for a «hardcore analysis» afterwards to make sure everything is going in the right direction.