Computational Specification of Building Requirements in theEarly Stages of Design

We have been exploring computational techniques to help building designers to specify design requirements during the early stages of design. In the past, little has been accomplished in this area either in terms of innovative computational technologies or the improvement of design performance. The prospect of improving design productivity and creating a seamless process between requirements specification and formal design are our primary motivations. This research has been conducted as partof a larger project entitled SEED (Software Environment to Support Early Phases in Building Design). SEED features an open-ended modular architecture, where each module provides support for a design activity that takes place in early design stages. Each module is supported by a database to store and retrieve information, as well as a user interface to support the interaction with designers. The module described in this paper, SEED-Pro (the architectural programming module of SEED), is a workingprototype for building design requirements specification. It can be used by other modules in SEED or by design systems in other domains, such as mechanical engineering, civil engineering, industrial designand electrical engineering. Our approach to SEED-Pro is divided into two phases: core, and support functionalities. The core functionalities operate in an interactive mode relying on a case-based approach to retrieve and adapt complex specification records to the problem at hand. The supportfunctionalities include the case-base, the data-base, and the standards processing environment for building specification tasks. Our findings indicate that SEED-Pro: (1) is a tool that structures the unstructured domain of design requirements, (2) enables the integration of design requirements with the rest of the design process, (3) leads to the creation of complex case-bases and (4) enables the observation of their performance in the context of real world design problems