Use of parametric approach for user-oriented development in building design: preliminary investigations

Building design is a highly interdisciplinary research field integrating technological, architectural, structural, social and other aspects. Participatory design, or co-design, already used in other disciplines, is now facilitated by the diffusion of Building Information Modelling which offers greater control of the interdisciplinary aspects in building design. But unlike other disciplines, architecture is characterized by a high number of requirements, partly formalizable, quantifiable and optimizable and partly only intuitive. Furthermore is difficulty to employ a collaborative design framework because designer and end user work on different knowledge levels: one works on satisfying classes of requirements, and the other is unable to abstract his needs and therefore properly formalize requirements or desires. The use of simple parametric models in the pre-design phase, based on algorithms capable of generating geometries dependent on multiple modifiable variables, could overcome this problem. This paper offers a preliminary investigation on the possibility of integrating bottom-up design aspects by giving parametric models to possible end users and allowing them to explore the design space, identifying preferential outputs and overcoming some of their technical gaps. Working in parametric environments in the pre-design phase opens to the integration of tools such as evolutionary multiobjective optimization algorithms (EMOA). New fitness functions can be defined to bring design closer to the end users’ proposed outputs without neglecting performance optimization, which is typical in parametric design. The framework proposed differs from existing “product configurator”, used in industrial design, which allows the personalization of aesthetic characteristics. This paper aims at a greater understanding of the end user’s will for satisfying them better in the subsequent design phases. The technological tools currently available to make this framework possible will be analysed, identifying shortcomings and problems, along with methodological implications.