Visualization Tools for Architects
This project falls within the context of the cluster of excellence (IntCDC), which is a large cluster of research projects funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) covering different disciplines that span from architecture, structural engineering, and building physics all the way to engineering geodesy, manufacturing, system engineering, robotics, and social sciences. All coming together to push the architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) industry forward to address its challenges of building housing and infrastructure for over 2.5 billion people in urban areas over the next 30 years. It is no secret1 that the productivity of the AEC industry is stagnating, if not declining, especially when compared with other industries such as agriculture or automotive, which have benefited from automation and digitization decades ago. Current methods applied by the AEC, and in particular the construction sector, are still labor-intensive and are significant contributors to climate change, global energy use, global waste, and global greenhouse gases 1.
In our work, we attempted to characterize the AEC industry and explain why it is not as straightforward to automate the industry using the same methods applied in the automotive industry. There are already some promising efforts 2 towards automation and digitization using computational design methods integrated with robotic fabrication, which promise to address many of the challenges facing the AEC industry. However, to realize the full potential of these efforts, there is a demand for digital tools to back and support them. Hence, the importance of visualization and visual analytics tools.
In that context, I took part in a few projects focused on building and designing visualization tools for architects and designers. One of them is shown in Figure 1. The FiberVis tool was built to support architects in exploring the design space of Coreless Filament Wound Structures (CFW). To develop such a tool, we followed user-centered the design study methodology 3 and other participatory design methods 4, in order to elicit the requirements, design, build, and evaluate the tool. For more information please read our paper.
Used Tech : WPF, C#, Rhino/Grasshopper
United Nations, “Buildings and climate change: Summary for decision makers,” UNEP DTIE, Sustainable Consumption and Production Branch, Nairobi, Kenya, Tech. Rep. 987-92-807-3064-7, 2009 ↩︎ ↩︎
N. Dambrosio et al., “BUGA fibre pavilion: Towards an architectural application of novel fiber composite building systems,” in Proc. 39th Annu. Conf. Assoc. Comput. Aided Des. Archit., 2019, pp. 140–149 ↩︎
M. Sedlmair, M. Meyer, and T. Munzner, “Design study methodology: Reflections from the trenches and the stacks,” IEEE Trans. Vis. Comput. Graphics, vol. 18, no. 12, pp. 2431–2440, Dec. 2012 ↩︎
E. Kerzner, S. Goodwin, J. Dykes, S. Jones, and M. Meyer, “A framework for creative visualizationopportunities workshops,” IEEE Trans. Vis. Comput. Graphics, vol. 25, no. 1, pp. 748–758, Jan. 2019. ↩︎
Moataz Abdelaal
Research Scientist (He/Him)
My research interests include network visualization, Visual Analytics, and Human-Computer Interaction.
