Co-design from Architectural, Social and Computational Perspectives: Methods for the Integrative Exploration of Design Spaces for Future Timber Buildings within Existing Urban Contexts

Our project aims to develop methods and tools for integrative design reviews based on architectural, regulative and socio-cultural decision-making criteria at the level of existing urban blocks. The challenge is to explore for, and with, future decision-makers and stakeholders the potential of multi-faceted co-design enabled by integrative computational design and construction of timber buildings, with a focus on visualisation approaches that broaden the (adaptive) design space. Research has shown that decision-making in the early design phase rarely considers a broader range of criteria and stakeholder concerns beyond geometric, technical and regulative criteria. Thus, we aim at exploring novel visual representations of design criteria and early designs that can facilitate communication and decision-making together with a broader audience. We will study and broaden the opportunities for integrating socio-cultural criteria and novel visualisations into early design decision-making by examining the specifics of current computational design systems for these purposes and the design criteria included in them. We will jointly specify the information and visualisation criteria for design exploration in urban building stock extensions and densifications. Based on the identified criteria and technical integration specifics determined by the co-design-based timber building system developed in the Cluster of Excellence IntCDC, we will develop a visual analytics system and create various visualisation options for design exploration. By probing the developed visualisation prototypes with different stakeholders and in early design scenarios for timber buildings in urban contexts, we plan to iteratively integrate novel visualisation approaches to open up the design space of computational architecture for liveable cities.

The research is conducted by the following institutes of the University of Stuttgart: Institute for Social Sciences (SOWI) (PI: Prof. Dr. Cordula Kropp), Institute for Computational Design and Construction (ICD) (PI: Prof. Achim Menges), and the Visualization Research Center (VISUS) (PI: Prof. Dr. Daniel Weiskopf).

Participating researchers from the social sciences:

• Prof. Dr. Cordula Kropp (PI)
• Dr. Yana Boeva
• apl. Prof. Dr. Kathrin Braun
• Paul Betz