Design Scenarios: Enabling transparent parametric design spaces

This paper presents a novel methodology called Design Scenarios (DSs) intended for use in conceptual design of buildings. DS enables multidisciplinary design teams to streamline the requirements definition, alternative generation, analysis, and decision-making processes by providing a methodology for building and managing requirements driven design spaces with parametric Computer Aided Design (CAD) tools. DS consists of four interdependent models: (1) Requirements Model - stakeholders and designers explicitly define and prioritize context specific design requirements; (2) Scenarios Model (SM) - designers formally transform these requirements into actions necessary to achieve them, and determine the geometric and material parameters, interrelationships, and potential conflicts; (3) Parametric Process Model (PPM) - CAD experts build and represent the technical implementation of a SM in a parametric model to enable design teams to manage and communicate its CAD models; (4) Alternative Analysis Model - analyze and visually report performance back to the designers and stakeholders. This paper motivates the need for the DS methodology thorough an industry case study, and establishes points of departure for the methodology through literature review. Next, the paper details the elements and methods in the methodology, describes its implementation into a software prototype, provides an illustrative example to explain, and an industry test case to validate how DS can potentially enable multidisciplinary teams to generate and communicate larger and better performing design spaces more efficiently than with traditional methods. (C) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.