Stephen Melville, the founding director of Format Engineers, will be addressing digital optimization and fabrication at the Computational Design: NEXT 8.0 conference. He founded Format in 2014 as an engineering design studio that bridges the worlds of science, art, architecture, and design. The company’s mission is to apply creativity to structural design, and it contains engineers, programmers, mathematicians, and architects with backgrounds in structural engineering, coding, and architecture. Stephen was also an Associate Lecturer at Oxford Brookes School of Architecture, and he gives lectures and critiques at architecture schools across the world. He has authored several publications in engineering and architecture on the issue of digital design. He has served on the Bristol Urban Design Forum, the visiting RIBA education panel, and the RIBA awards panel in 2013.