ABSTRACT
Software is primarily about enabling communication - taking something inchoate and making it clear - and this chapter considers various attempts at designing architectural software that is intended to fulfil this desire for clarity. The introduction of Computer-aided design (CAD) changed not only the manual activity of drawing a line, but also the understanding of the relation between the act of drawing and the thing drawn. The idea behind building information modelling (BIM), the current incarnation of CAD software, is the translation of a data model into a working method, by which the model and its associated metadata become the primary repository of design information and tool for design communication. The chapter suggests what a more 'open' design process would look like, and how this could be enabled by software. For the purpose of the argument, it refers to the opposite of the black box as 'open design'.
