• What is development? What conditions are necessary and sufficient in order to call a system developmental? Can we specify a litmus test that differentiates between a developmental and a non-developmental system? While local interaction and unfolding over time have been traditional hallmarks of G&DS research, are they in fact computational burdens that should be abstracted away?

• Is the purpose of building a developmental system to model nature or simply to abstract its essential elements in pursuit of better algorithms?

• When studying a concrete example of natural development, how might one decide on what is relevant to the modeling of development? And in reverse, how might one transfer mechanisms of development from abstract systems to physical ones?

• What is the relationship(s) between evolution and development? Is the purpose of evolution confined to searching for acceptable configurations of a developmental programme? How can evolution computation benefit from development?

• Why do we need automated tools that produce complex software/hardware artifacts/designs? Is G&DS the only branch of Evolutionary Computation that has the potential to produce artifacts that rival the complexity of organisms in nature? Are there non-evolutionary and non-developmental approaches that can produce equally complex artifacts?

• How may we incorporate into highly-adaptable physical systems, the ‘intrinsic’ qualities of development, such as self-organization, self-replication and self-repair? Should we expect that development within physical artificial life shall be observable only within the confines of the physical-chemical mechanisms found in biology?

• What are the different approaches of Computational Development? What do they have in common and what differentiates them from each other? What are their strengths and weaknesses, and how can they all be improved?

• Are qualitative observations about empirical results, such as emergence of repeating motifs, more important than quantitative performance comparisons? What kind of mathematical/statistical tools are needed to describe the dynamics of G&DS?

• On which kinds of applications are developmental approaches most suited? Developmental systems grow and complexify over time. This implies that they should best be applied to problems which do not have fixed dimensionality.