Computational by Design, towards a co-designed material culture. A design tool

Recently Digital Fabrication equipment became widely accessible, as well as the tools of Computational Design (also called generative, parametric) which are ever more powerful and easier to use. Hence, the control over a product's design can be shared between the designer, user and algorithms, even though personalisable products are still rare in the material culture. Beyond technological limitations, there might be also a shortage of adequate conceptual capabilities in the Design profession. Therefore, the paper presents a new design tool: a canvas centred on user divergences, so that the adequate degrees of freedom are left for computational co-design, benefitting from creative user contributions. The title "Computational by Design" suggests that computation in "Computational Design" shouldn't be used neither for the technology's sake, nor for marginal aesthetic and performance improvements, but it should be a new frontier of human-centred design based on a natively algorithmic thinking.