Anke Rolvink (1983) started her PhD research project in December 2010 at the BEMNext laboratory of the Faculty of Civil Engineering and Geosciences of the Delft University of Technology. The PhD research focuses on the development of new intelligent design tools for early design stages. The aim of the research is to develop new computational strategies and technologies to innovate the building design process, with a focus on safety in the earliest stages of design. In order to do so, computational design tools will be made more appropriate to conceptual design and engineering by studying and philosophising what design is actually about, and what are its key values and key characteristics. The development of design tools which are able to determine the distribution of probability and can present possible failure scenarios can assist the building engineer in designing a structural system.
Besides her PhD thesis she works part-time as a structural engineer and computational designer at Arup Amsterdam. At Arup she is involved in various design and research projects, mostly related to computational design.
During her Master thesis, finished in 2010, she developed StructuralComponents2.0, a toolbox for the designing structural engineer. StructuralComponents is a parametric associative design toolbox for the conceptual structural design of tall building structures. The toolbox allows the designing engineer to compose a structural concept in a matter of minutes, present the results on a dashboard and analyse it in near real-time. Moreover, the parametric associative nature allows the engineer to adapt and judge the concept quickly and easily. The challenge of the toolbox is to support the early stages of design, improve the interaction between the architect and engineer and consequently result in better and quicker design processes.
