Coding Engines in Participatory Social Housing Design—A Case to Revisit Pattern Languages

Abstract

Participation has been touted as a critical instrument for both citizen empowerment and responsibility-sharing in sustainability. In architecture, participation allows for the progression of green building to sustainable habitation that integrates environmental, economic, and social dimensions. However, participation in practice rarely delegates meaningful decisions to marginalized groups and is mostly a one-sided process. This study seeks to investigate which factors of the participatory method afford both empowerment and behavioral change to a sustainable lifestyle in low-income groups. To do so, a case study of designing a social housing estate in Hungary is presented, where participatory design was used to codevelop a building that considers and adjusts to the sustainable lifestyle envisioned by the future residents. A coding engine based on the concept of pattern languages was developed that places conditions and experience of everyday activities at the center of design, translating them to spatial features. As a result, a focus group of social housing tenants and cohousing experts were able to define explicit shared spaces, allocate square meters to them, and articulate legible design criteria. Of the early-stage design decisions, 45% were made with or by the participants, and the bilateral process made it possible to convince the tenants to adopt a more sustainable habitation format.

From type to network: a review of knowledge representation methods in architecture intelligence design

“…In terms of design generation and optimization, Zhao Qun summarized the ecological architectural pattern language based on the cave dwelling model by studying the settlement characteristics and performance of traditional dwelling buildings in Northwest China, which provided the basis for the ecological design strategy of new dwelling buildings (Zhao, 2005); Bukovszki et al designed a coding engine based on the concept of pattern language by investigating the sustainable lifestyles of low-income people in Hungary, which is to realize the social housing participatory design of low-income people. The marking of daily life scenes, through cluster analysis, lead to decision-making goals for oriented design that participants usually can make 45% of the decisions in early design stage (Bukovszki et al, 2021) (Fig. 4); Na et al proposed a new method for evaluating design performance based on pattern language.…”

“…SN realizes knowledge reasoning through inheritance and matching methods, similar to the KR method Fig. 4 Methodology of participatory design based on pattern language (Bukovszki et al, 2021) Fig. 5 Pattern language for design method vs. evaluation (Na et al, 2020) based on type and pattern, it also belongs to the explicit declarative KR method.…”

“…(c) Network-based KR method has better extrapolation capabilities in architecture design. Taking floor plan design as an example, designers can recognize Design evaluation and public participation (Bukovszki et al, 2021;Na et al, 2020) Design pattern language People's subjective evaluation of design Network-based KR Landscape and urban planning analysis evaluation (Dong, 2016;Dong et al, 2021;Yu et al, 2016) Semantic network Design flow prediction (Gao et al, 2021;Gao, Zhang, He, et al, 2022;Gao, Zhang, Huang, & Shi, 2022) Knowledge graph/Modeling event log…”

On Transforming Unused Urban Spaces to Social Housing for Self-Employed People in Ho Chi Minh City: An Architectural Space Design Proposal

“…In recent years, some social housing projects have considered engaging the business above spaces in the implication model. Due to such interactions, social housing transformation needs to be viewed synthetically, with all aspects of sustainability in general [13,14].…”