We describe a generating tree approach to the enumeration and exhaustive generation of knonnesting set partitions and permutations. Unlike previous work in the literature using the connections of these objects to Young tableaux and restricted lattice walks, our approach deals directly with partition and permutation diagrams. We provide explicit functional equations for the generating functions, with k as a parameter.The heart of the argument maps the objects to a sequence of Young tableaux, and the bijection is achieved by taking the transpose of the tableaux.From the enumerative point of view, results have been far less forthcoming. The enumeration of k-nonnesting matchings was completed by Chen et al. in their master work by using a bijection to collections of noncrossing Dyck paths whose enumeration was known. Consequently, the results are elegant. Also, the class of 2-noncrossing (or simply noncrossing) partitions is counted by Catalan numbers, and so one could hope for a similarly beautiful enumeration scheme. So far, only exact formulas exist for 3-noncrossing set partitions, and beyond that, a far more complicated structure is conjectured. Specifically, Bousquet-Mélou and Xin [4] did a complete functional equation analysis, and determined explicit exact and asymptotic enumeration formulas.Although their functional equations can be adapted to enumerate set partitions with higher noncrossing numbers, they conjecture that the structure of the generating function becomes more complicated. Conjecture 1.1 (Bousquet-Mélou,Xin 2005 [4]). For every k > 3, the generating function of k-noncrossing set partitions is not D-finite. Mishna and Yen [26] determined functional equations for k-nonnesting set partitions, and described a process for isolating coefficients, giving additional evidence for Conjecture 1.1. A more recent development considers set partitions where the maximum nesting size and the maximum crossing size are controlled simultaneously. The resulting generating functions are rational [25], and (in theory) can be determined explicitly. They can be summed together for a different picture of generating functions for k-nonnesting partitions. 1.2. Permutations. The arc diagram is a convenient way to view permutations, as it simultaneously highlights both the cycle structure, and the line notation structure. Corteel [14] used arc diagrams to directly connect various permutation statistics, such as exceedences and permutation patterns to occurrences of nestings and crossings. Burill, Mishna and Post [8] extended this definition, and directly adapted the results of Chen et al. to prove that k-nonnesting permutations are in bijection with k-noncrossing permutations. They computed enumerative data by brute force, by finding the nesting and crossing numbers of each permutation. Consequently, the data is restricted to small sizes only. The generating function for permutations in which both the maximum nesting and maximum crossing numbers are controlled is rational [31], similarly to the case of set partitions. Exten...