Michael Pryor, Pavlina Vardoulaki and Li Chen were the keynote lecturers at this year’s AIA Quad Conference with their presentation “Automation in Design, Design by Automation”. Design is an ever changing process, each time moving further and further into design automation and process optimization. With each evolution in automated design thinking the designer becomes more free to be concerned with big picture items, leaving repetitive and technical aspects of the design to the automation process in the form of systems and algorithms. The bases of the talk will focus on this shift in the design paradigm.