4 Years and 4 Months at Zenerate and After (2)
2025. 02. 01.
After a long journey of 4 years and 4 months at Zenerate, I'm going back to school to finish my undergraduate degree. My extended leave of absence has finally run its course, and now I must truly attend classes. These days, I've been reflecting on my experience as a software engineer at a startup.
2. About architectural design automation(or, generative design)¶
Zenerate is a company creating architectural design automation(or, generative design) services. This dramatically increased the difficulty of our work because it was hard to find similar companies, so we had to build everything from scratch without any reference materials. Even after carefully defining the service specifications and technology stack, finding people to develop it together was not easy. This is a problem faced by all companies dealing with architectural design automation, which is why the few services created by companies around the world have completely different features. Some generate only large buildings, some only small buildings, some create real-time design proposals but don't show various options, and some take a few minutes to generate design proposals after inputting conditions but can create dozens or hundreds of plausible buildings that fit within the land.
Contemplating how to structure buildings, what data structures to use to represent them, what details can or cannot be expressed through this representation method, and how to efficiently store and process buildings filled with geometric information - this is what I believe is the core of architectural design automation. Since accidentally encountering this field at Boundless in 2016, I have somehow (though I wandered a bit in between) continued to create related services, and I believe there are still plenty of things to research and try.
The problem is that not many people are interested in this field. Because it's intertwined with architecture, understanding architecture is necessary to conduct related research and development, and a certain level of knowledge across various areas of development centered on data structures (especially those related to geometric shapes) is also required. One might think we could find such developers among programmers. But the moment you try to find developers who have worked with geometric information, the pool suddenly shrinks, and when you try to find those among them who are interested in architecture... really just a handful remain. Then what if we look for developers among architects? These days, such people have somewhat increased, but finding those with sufficient understanding of data structures and algorithms is as difficult as finding a needle in a haystack. A bit of a tangent, but developers who know how to develop usually call themselves computational designers. However, through recruiting, I've found that this term alone tells me absolutely nothing about what work they've done or what technologies they can handle. So I really dislike this term.
I wish we could find more people seriously engaged in architectural design automation. I've been searching continuously until now, and I'll probably continue searching in the future.