The Digital Design Consortium (DDC) is a unique collaboration involving participants from two disparate fields: architecture and computer science. It is one of only a few efforts in the academic world to bring together specialists who have backgrounds in both design and information technology. What's more, as a member of the University of Minnesota's Digital Technology Center, the DDC has access to and can leverage the cross-disciplinary expertise of the other Center members including robotics, multimedia and data mining.

The research of the DDC addresses the entire architectural design process: from the acquisition of data regarding the construction site, to the design of the building that will be situated at the location, to the selection of the materials that will be used to fabricate the structure. The goal of the DDC is to exploit emerging digital technologies and to develop computer based design techniques that are appropriate at distinct points in the design of a new building. The DDC is developing separate tools that allow the architect to deal with the changes that occur in physical scale, point of view, design intent, and level of detail as the design progresses from an outline on a site plan, to a model of an actual building, to a set of finished construction drawings.