Hi, thank you for you interest in this work.
My name is Kyung Hoon Hyun.
Today I will be talking about an interactive prototyping platform for collaborative spatial
design exploration.
This is a joint work with Kihoon Son, Hwiwon Chun and Sojin Park, and it was done at Hanyang
University.
The most important spatial design ideas, project principles and fundamental design decisions
are developed in the ealiest design phase.
Spatial design design projects such as architecture and interior design begin with conceptualization
that includes abstract diagramming, zoning and massing to provide foundation for making
design decisions.
Abstract diagrams guide designers to explore alternative designs without focusing excessively
on details.
Also, abstraction aids design creativity and helps designers in transferring only the essential
relationships of the design properties.
However, ambiguous and incomplete designs can cause communication issues when presented
to collaborator.
Therefore designers devote significant amounts of time and resources into searching for design
references and developing rough prototypes to refine their design concepts.
We identified three liminations for the current design exploration process in spatial design.
First, design communication is crucial to the design process for facilitating accurate
delivery of information.
However, abstract diagram sketches in the early stage of design cannot convey the intent
of the designer effectively.
Second, creating a physical prototype of a spatial design requires time and resources.
Physical models facilitate not only the communication to design collaborators and customers but
also the examination of design ideas and decision making.
Third, taditional design reference search methods are unsuitable for obtaining spatial
design data.
Spatial designers must consider various elements such as user requirements, room properties
and room connectivity.
Currently designers primarily use relevant textual terms to search for references such
as google images and pinterest images.
Spatial Design and HCI community had many past works in design support system, prototyping,
TUI, and design reference retrieval.
Past works on spatial design support system concentrate on the generative design based
on predefined objects but it is difficult to establish a clear design objective in the
early design phase.
Despite of the advancement of prototyping in spatial design, TUI and design reference
retrieval methods developed by researchers, research on integrating the all of the above
features into a single system for spatial design support system has yet been investigated.
Thus, this study proposes C-Space, an interactive platform that assists users in exploring spatial
design ideas through a tangible user interface and augmented reality.
The interactive design process through C-Space involves the following steps.
(a) Retrieving design referenes through graphical user interface.
(b) Discussing and altering the retrieved references through tangible user interface.
(c) Testing finishing materials using projection mapping.
C-Space is a design support system that stands for “collaborative space” and “see[si:]
space.”
It consists of six major components.
1) physical modeling components; 2) design reference data analysis; 3) three design reference
retrieval methods; 4) material simulation; 5) design alternative management; 6) export
to BIM format.
C-Space supports a TUI environment for Physical Modeling in Architectural design, scaled down
to 1/30.
The physical modeling components consist of modular building blocks, room marker blocks,
numbering interface, and grid board.
The modular building blocks are used to assemble walls and rooms, and room marker blocks are
used to indicate the room types.
A magnet with diameter 3 mm was installed at the bottom of the blocks to prevent them
from falling apart.
The building blocks have infrared (IR) reflective stickers on the top to enable automatic wall
detection.
The room markers have color stickers.
Each color indicates a room type (balcony = green; bathroom = blue; living room = red;
entrance = pink; bedroom = yellow).
The grid board was made of a steel plate.
The grid board could be rotated 360°, and the AR marker on the grid board was used to
detect the rotational angle to responsively map design reference and finishing material
on the rotating grid board in real time.
The numbering interface left to the grid board consists of ’1’, ’2’, ’3’, and
’4 and more’ areas.
Once the room marker blocks are placed in the number area, C-Space recognizes the number
of the input room type.
The residential building design references were used as retrieval data.
We collected 13,312 floor plants of residential spaces in Seoul, Korea from a web-based real-estate
database.
C-Space supports Three retrieval methods: 1) shape-based, 2) number of rooms-based,
3) room connectivity-based methods.
A C-Space user can search for a floor plan reference with a similar shape by assembling
the outer walls on the grid board using building blocks.
In this case, users do not need to complete the outer walls of the desired shape; users
only need to assemble the corners of the desired shape on the grid board.
To search for references using the number of rooms-based method, users must input the
number of rooms per room type by placing the room marker blocks on the numbering interface.
Then, the webcam detects the room marker and processes the number of rooms-based retrieval
method.
In the room-connectivity search, the entire dataset is first filtered based on connectivity.
The purpose of this filtering operation is not to perform graph matching to obtain data
identical to the user input but to perform subgraph matching to obtain data including
the user input.
These three methods can be used in parallel.
Once users complete the assembly of the building block, materials can be simulated on the physical
model.
Users can select and apply finishing materials by using C-Space GUI.
When the "Mapping" button on the GUI is pressed, the system reconstructs 3D walls by using
two adjacent points among the assembled model input, and a floor is created based on all
the corners of each room.
Then the preinstalled projectors map the reconstructed 3D model with the material texture to the
assembled building blocks by adjusting camera FOV, viewpoint location, and rotation.
Users can save the design alternatives that they create; 3D model, material data, floor
plan references used to complete the design alternative are saved.
Additionally, users can track design generation history.
Also, C-Space supports guide projection on the grid board to help users in remodeling
the saved design alternatives.
The design alternative created with C-Space can be exported to a BIM file format.
The outcome can be exported as an rvt file, an extension of Autodesk Revit.
C-Space was implemented in the predefined lab test condition.
C-Space requires preinstallation of 12 equipment listed on the slide.
We have cameras, a computer, 3 projectors and physical modeling components.
To test the impact of the proposed system to the designers, we conducted user studies.
Novice designers and professional designers were invited for user experiment which lasted
approximately 4 hours.
The participants were grouped into teams.
Each team comprise three members, and a total of four teams participated in the experiment.
Each group performed a design task based on a design brief.
There were two types of design briefs: 1) a house was to be designed for a retired couple
who use wheelchairs and their two daughters; 2) a house was to be designed for a young
couple and their little son who requires a room for piano practice.
Despite the different design approaches, both novice and professional groups shared positive
responses to the impact of C-Space.
According to the in-depth interviews with the 12 participants, we categorized six advantage
of the C-Space.
First is the “assisting rapid spatial design exploration and development.”
Users commented that C-Space allows them to make team design decisions much faster than
traditional methods even in the early stages of the design.
For example, users can search the design reference, and explore design alternative, modify design
alternative and checking the new design alternative on the target design site very quickly.
So, the designers can rapidly go through multiple iterations to explore more optimized design
solutions.
Second advantage is “experiencing space and scale.”
Users commented that the design outcome assembled with modular building blocks was effective
in communicating and modifying designs among the team members.
For example, a user explained design idea to team members.
With the modular building blocks, users were able to predict the room size.
The modular building blocks made it easy to measure the size of the room along with wall
thickness and the width of the corridor.
Third advantage is “developing details in the early stage.”
C-Space can assist the designers in developing design ideas in the early design phase without
a concrete design concept.
Designers can search design references gradually depending on the input condition.
While users were exploring design references, they get new design ideas from the partial
layouts from various references.
For example, a professional design team was designing for a retired couple on a wheelchair
and they got an idea of arranging every rooms connected to a long aisle in order to help
the couple to move around more efficiently.
Fourth advantage is “inducing collaborative discussion.”
We observed that discussions were actively conducted in all the four teams.
These discussions accounted for 73% of the entire design experiment.
The indepth interviews also revealed that C-Space promoted the collaboration, regardless
of the relationships among the participants.
For example, P10 said, “I was working with the stranger and it was awkward in the tutorial.
However, we felt like we were getting closer as if we were assembling modular building
blocks together like Lego.” also, P11 said, “It was possible to design and evaluate
models together without knowing the personality or working style of team members, so there
was no problem in collaboration.”
Thus, C-space motivates multiple users to collaboratively develop design ideas by modifying
retrived design references partially or entirely during the early design phase.
The last advantage of the C-Space is the “integration of early design phase to later design phases.”
According to participant responses, the design alternative management feature to archive
design references was helpful.
This feature helped designers to review previous concepts for reference in the later design
stage.
For example, when the design was developed and the users faced a design fixation, they
were exploring the design alternatives that they designed previously.
The users reviewed previous design alternative along with the reference history to re-evaluate
why they did not develop the alternative further.
Therefore, creating a large set of possible and reliable design alternatives and references
was useful to assimilate knowledge acquired from the early design phase to use the same
in later design phases.
In conclusion this study proposed C-Space, a Novel Design support system for interactive
and collaborative spatial design exploration.
There are two major contribution of this study.
We created an interactive platform on the collaborative spatial design exploration.
We believe that C-Space represents a novel contribution in the area of interactive exploration
of large collections of design references, particularly those with information on spatial
layout, connectivity and shape.
C-Space offers a collaborative design platform with the integration of useful features, including
design reference exploration using AR and prototyping using TUI that could enhance collaborative
processes and produce satisfactory design outcomes.
C-Space can be an example of an integrated collaborative system that motivates designers
to interact with designs.
If you have any questions, please feel free to e-mail me.
Thank you.