S. Chien, S. Choo, M. A. Schnabel, W. Nakapan, M. J. Kim, S. Roudavski (eds.), Living Systems and Micro-Utopias: Towards Continuous Designing, Proceedings of the 21st International Conference of the Association for Computer-Aided Architectural Design Research in Asia CAADRIA 2016, 000–000. © 2016, The Association for Computer-Aided Architectural Design Research in Asia (CAADRIA), Hong Kong. TOWARDS THE IMPLEMENTATION OF A COMPO- SITE CELLULAR AUTOMATA MODEL FOR THE EX- PLORATION OF DESIGN SPACE CAMILO CRUZ 1 , JUSTYNA KARAKIEWICZ 2 and MICHAEL KIRLEY 3 1, 2, 3 University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia ccruz@student.unimelb.edu.au, {justynak, mkirley} @unimelb.edu.au Abstract. In this paper, we introduce a novel composite Cellular Automata (CA) model to explore the space of design for human environments. Consisting of multiple, regularly spaced, interleaved 1D CA, our model provides a mechanism to evolve flexible spatial units, where the ‘cells’ are not defined as programmatic elements but as ‘form-making’ elements. The efficacy of this approach is evaluated via a standard methodology, typically used in the study of complex adaptive systems. We systematically examine the dynamics of a series of instances of the composite CA by varying initial conditions and transition rules. A measure of entropy is used to validate emergent patterns. Subsequently, we investigate whether the composite CA is capable of generating aggregate spatial units to match specific spatial configurations, using a well-known example as a benchmark. This phase allows us to bring an understanding of the results into the context of architectural design. Keywords. Cellular automata; generative design; design space. 1. Introduction Design can be conceived as a purposeful, constrained, decision-making process where the aim is to transform an existing situation into a desired one (Press, 1995, Simon, 1996). When designing environments for humans, such transformations are typically developed by generating some sort of physical form (Woodbury, 1991), where the aim is to characterise the space and make it suitable for different forms of inhabitation to take place.