Precedent Based Design Foundations for Parametric Design : The Case of Navigation and Wayfinding

Parametric design systems serve as powerful assistive tools in the design process by providing a flexible approach for the generation of a vast number of design alternatives. However, contemporary parametric design systems focus primarily on low-level engineering and structural forms, without an explicit means to also take into account high-level, cognitively motivated people-centred design goals. We present a precedent-based parametric design method that integrates people-centred design “precedents” rooted in empirical evidence directly within state of the art parametric design systems. As a use-case, we illustrate the general method in the context of an empirical study focusing on the multi-modal analysis of wayfinding behaviour in two large-scale healthcare environments. With this use-case, we demonstrate the manner in which: (1). a range of empirically established design precedents —e.g., pertaining to visibility and navigation— may be articulated as design constraints to be embedded directly within state of the art parametric design tools (e.g., Grasshopper); and (2). embedded design precedents lead to the (parametric) generation of a number of morphologies that satisfy people-centred design criteria (in this case, pertaining to wayfinding). Our research presents an exemplar for the integration of cognitively motivated design goals with parametric design-space exploration methods. We posit that this opens-up a range of technological challenges for the engineering and development of next-generation computer aided architecture design systems.