Sensory Evaluation of Past Cases and Design Candidates for Cunceptual Structural Design.

Abstract

At the conceptual stage of structural design, subjective decisions play an important role based on sensory and aesthetic evaluation of the design object, since they are scarcely considered in the following stages in which objective technical decisions are dominant. Decision-making is vague for the sensory design aspects, and it is hard to extract them as design knowledge through conventional interviews of human designers. Past design cases are the results of hidden reasoning processes and contain the implicit design rationale of the human designer. A case-based approach is a possible way to deal with such a subjective process. In this article, we discuss a method to identify the relations among structural attributes and sensory evaluation from past design cases and to utilize them for design candidate generation. A conceptual design assistant is considered for a structural system by taking sensory aspects as well as structural ones into account. The assistant system is examined for the case of arched bridge design.