Evaluating design decisions in the context of cosmos

This paper describes the methodology, implementation, and application of the design and evaluation system, COSMOS, for architectural design decisions. The evaluation system addresses the problem that most of the attention of designers, especially the student designer, is focused on the building form. The computer-aids for visualizing design are growing in number and improving in quality. The development of tools for comprehensive numerical evaluations shows in comparison a slight lag. Substantive progress has been made in these fields, but integration of the fields seems very difficult to achieve. This makes it difficult for architects to implement the results of these newly developed systems into their work. In order to facilitate the evaluation of one or more designs, a small system, EVALUATE, as an extension of COSMOS, has been developed to examine the major relationships between design decisions and their effects. COSMOS enables a user to design a building interactively by defining the geometry, the intended functions, and the construction materials of the structure. EVALUATE enables a user to assess the relations between the different attributes of a design or different designs by inspecting the relevant scattergrams. EVALUATE is based on bi-variate analyses of combinations of attributes of the designs. The attributes form the design and the effect variables in the basic external database. The effect variables may be either produced by COSMOS itself or by various external applications.