Shifting Design Work from Production to Evaluation An Evolutive Design Tool

Abstract

We are developing an evolutive design tool that seeks to facilitate a shift in the focus of the process of designing architecture: away from the production of design alternatives or options towards an evaluation of semi-automatically generated ones. We work towards outsourcing the production of design alternatives in a given design task to a CAD tool and thereby give human designers more time to evaluate and discuss those alternatives and guide the tool in the production of improved alternatives. The format of our work is an experimental student design and research project where architects and computer scientists collaborate. Though the project is in a very early stage, our aim is to ultimately shift the focus of human designers' involvement from production of design options to the evaluation of those, in order to give humans more time to think, discuss, find, analyze and include many different points of view and make it easier for them to be impartial in finding optimal solutions. We developed a design tool that uses interactive evolutionary algorithms to support exploration of design options.