There is much upon which the CAAD community can congratulate itself; each year the proceedings of E C A A D E, A C A D I A, C A A D Futures and now C A A D R I A expose an increasingly rich diversity of applications of the information technologies to architectural education. The purpose of this paper, however, is to highlight the relative paucity of applications which lie at the very centre of design education - i.e. the "cause and effect" of how design decisions impact upon the quality of the building.