Building a Case-Based Design Assistant for Workplace Environment Design

This paper reports on the early stages of development of a case-based design tool. The purpose of this tool, called the Workplace Environment Design Advisor (WEDA), is to support architects in the conceptual design of workplace environments. The objective of this system is to provide electronic storage, retrieval and the exploration of post-occupancy performance knowledge of workplace environments. The paper provides a description of the reasoning behind choosing a case-based approach and the steps used to develop a prototype case-based system. This includes recent efforts to collect and structure real case data. This experience led to observations about issues such as case content (the availability and format of post-occupancy data) and retrieval strategies. The data collected for use in the system is based on a building-in-use study of the Centre of Building Research’s office rooms located at the University of Eindhoven, the Netherlands.