Comparing Design Strategies: A System for Optimization-Based Design Exploration

Abstract

The paper presents a system for supporting optimizationbased design exploration, with a special focus on comparing design strategies for early design stages. The system is developed to facilitate designers to conduct multiple optimization runs so as to compare the strengths and weaknesses among different design strategies. The system connects Rhino-Grasshopper to a web-based evaluation server. In Rhino-Grasshopper, designers can encode different design strategies and input these parametrized strategies into the optimization workflow that connects to the evaluation server. The evaluation server records the data sent from Rhino-Grasshopper and provides various interfaces to visualize and analyze optimization results. To demonstrate its utility, a case study is presented to demonstrate the utility of the system in urban design.