Co-evolution and emergence in design

Evolution as a metaphor borrowed from nature can be used to describe a design process. However, this has generally been applied to the evolution of a solution which assumes the problem does not change throughout the process. This is a naive assumption in design because the problem indeed changes. This paper considers the evolution of both the problem and solution and introduces co-evolutionary design. This paper proposes two approaches to implementing co-evolutionary design and also addresses the related issues of evaluation and termination in a computational model. Finally, the paper considers how a coevolutionary system can generate and recognize emergent structure and behaviour.