This paper reviews the debate for and against the role of digital media in architectural designing. The architectural design community continues to remain polarized between the two camps. However, the arguments experienced through practice and which are presented in available literature are not unwarranted. It is suggested that they tend to undermine the sophistication of a contemporary architectural designer and distract from the more pertinent issue of how to advance design creativity. This review of the main argument will form the foreground for exploring opportunities in this paper, and in future academic research, for the integration of digital media in the early stages of designing, in particular the generative uses of digital media employed for creative potential. This paper draws conclusions through practice-based research that demonstrate that aspects such as spatiality and formation can be extended through digital media. Furthermore, computational explorations that are coupled with looser, more ephemeral approaches can result in digital media integrations that do not impede creativity or conventional design processes.

As a young architectural practitioner and an academic, it interests me that the architectural design community can continue to remain polarized between championing the role of digital media as part of their design processes and downright rejecting it. One such extreme position is a view that this media has either `no place' (Sanders, 1995; and Martens et al., 2007) within the architectural design and is thus seen as `just another tool', filling at best an ancillary and service role in the design process (Kvan et al., 2004). This view therefore suggests that designing with digital media has hardly advanced (Corrigan, 2003, p. 86). An opposing view is that digital media can take a more fundamental place to advance design methods (Rahim, 2006, p. 1), or even revolutionarily improve the design process beyond `question and debate' (Winner, 1986, p. 6 in Steele, 2001, p. 13), resulting in a `new architecture' and encouraging significant changes in designing through semi-automated generation of design and interconnected ways of communicating (Lindsey, 2001, p. 12).

This paper reviews the debate I captured in my thesis (Benton, 2008). In my Ph.D. studies, I explored technological and social implications of working with digital media in a well-regarded Australian-based architectural practice (Blythe, 2007). The implications presented in my thesis included beneficial creative gains and some disturbances to designing and a particular mutuality in the relationship that exists between designers and their digital media. Along with an increasing group of interested designers, I have arrived at a new state of mind in my practice and research.

Architecture Journal, Architectural Design, Digital Media, Generative Design, Conventional Design Process, Potential Avenues, Conventional Media, Mutual Relationship, Digital Techniques, Architectural Professionalism, Computational Framework.