Aspect-based Building Design

A collaboration with the Project R1-[ImageSpace] - Mental Representations of Spatial Environments Transregional Collaborative Research Center Spatial Cognition, University of Bremen

contact: Georg Vrachliotis

The ongoing research is based on descriptions of architectural design processes from a cognitive science and artificial intelligence perspective. It characterizes the design task in terms of classical AI problem solving attributes. As architectural design specifications leave many relevant dimensions unspecified, it is a fascinating question how these dimensions are fixed during the design process. General strategies are identified to cope with the complex space of spatial design by considering cognitive approaches to understanding and problem solving. The AI “divide and conquer” problem solving strategy is adapted to the common design strategy of reducing problem complexity by focusing on different aspects of the design problem at a time.

A universal method for conquering architectural design problems does not exist. Rather, design practice requires the combination of a host of different methods, techniques, and representational formats. Problem segmentation into non-overlapping parts is not an option for typical design problems. Instead of taking this property as a weak spot (i.e. in comparison to computational properties of well-defined problems) and trying to work around and hide it, aspectualize and conquer can serve as a framework to turn the diverse complexity of design problems into an opportunity: We see that humans are able to find solutions to design problems and that working with concrete mental and external models that aspectualizing problems is important to their success. The considerations presented here further support this on a theoretical note. We argue that setting the focus on design problems as being ill-defined actually results in too much effort being devoted to the marginal parts of them that happen to be well-defined or to special kinds of problems that are not typical of the problem class. Instead, conceptualizations of problem structure should capture the existing properties adequately and without valuation. Aspectualize and conquer provides such a framework.

-- GeorgVrachliotis - 10 May 2005