Now that I’m back from Toronto I have the time to share some news that came our way last week.
The production team at Frontiers in Sustainable Cities informed us that a paper we’ve been working on - Experiential space analysis: scoring tranquil, social, and explorative places in habitable buildings - has been published in their research topic on Intelligent Systems for Sustainable Building: Balancing IEQ with Energy Efficiency.
The paper is the culmination of significant effort from the various authors - Rhys, Nastaran, Jeremy, Seba, Dianne, Frederik, Mike, Liviu, Tomas, Dagmara and myself - over a couple of years. The paper charts the start of our journey to explore whether spatial analysis allows us to predict how architectural spaces might be used - whether they are tranquil, social or explorative in nature - in order to deliver insights early in the design phase when various decisions around materials etc. have not been made.
Technically the various prototypes we created to support this work made heavy use of voxel-based space analysis - we used our VASA library for this, of course - whether from Dynamo (our primary development environment) or inside Forma. Here’s a prototype Forma extension that makes use of VASA’s WebAssembly module to deliver insights based on the algorithms outlined in the paper:
You should think of this paper as the beginning of a discussion on this topic: we’ve deliberately chosen language indicating that we’re trying to predict these qualities - rather than saying we’re measuring or scoring designs in a scientifically rigorous way - as we would love to see people engage with this research and take it further. We believe that algorithmic predictions such as this are a valuable technique that will increasingly be complemented by AI models trained from large-scale datasets reflecting the human experience of architecture.
If you’re interested in discussing this research with us, please do reach out!
