I-Corps: An Intuitive Design Platform for Sustainable Multifamily Residential Buildings

The broader impact/commercial potential of this I-Corps project is the development of design tools for multifamily residential housing that can facilitate the connection between early stages of visual thinking activity and more mature stages of development and refinement. Such tools have the potential to improve the quality of future housing complexes. Due to the unprecedented increase in demand, efficiency and speed appear to be prioritized in the professional practice of designing commonplace housing complexes. During urban multifamily residential design, architects and developers are often under pressure to achieve financial and performance objectives such as base building efficiency, design compliance, and energy use intensity in short schematic design periods. While architects must meet new sustainability standards, they are also expected to demonstrate creative solutions for humanizing mass housing for the well-being of residents. Developers are also facing challenges in fulfilling complex requirements for local communities in regard to the impacts of new projects, including public access and shading effects on neighborhoods. While there are some emerging tools to auto-generate building schemes with environmental and financial performance measures to aid professionals' productivity, the experience with these tools is not as intuitive as the natural experience of sketching on paper.This I-Corps project is based on the development of a collaborative design platform for the schematic design of a multifamily residential project. Users in the architecture, engineering, and construction industries have a long history of conceptualizing design graphically, utilizing standard architectural representation formats such as plans, sections, and physical models, that are mostly static in nature. This system will allow designers to quickly create a series of parametric designs and dynamic digital models that can be changed on the fly with minimal input. The and intuitive interfaces. Using this method, a diverse range of users, from novice designers to practitioners not only in architecture but also in real-estate development, may participate in the design process, allowing them to more effectively incorporate qualitative contributions from early phases of design into more developed phases. This proposed tool provides functions to produce schematic designs using simple line-based sketches provided by users and assessments for preliminary financial and environmental criteria that are critical factors in today's professional practice.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.