SALEH KALANTARI - Washington State University, United States of America
EBRAHIM POUSTINCHI - University of Kentucky, United States of America

Many elements of architectural design are becoming automated, and the boundaries between design, construction, and use are increasingly blurred. These developments have produced concerns that ourdesignprocessesmightoutrun humanfactors inoursearchfornovelty and automation. At the same time, however, this new technology can also improve our opportunities to develop human-centric environments. This paper describes the creation of an interactive form-making exhibit called ROBOBBLE, and the use of this installation to engage users in design while collecting data about their architectural preferences. The ultimate goal of the ongoing project is to learn more about human form creation and architectural evaluations, and to integrate those findings into computational design algorithms and pre-design toolkits. A pilot study was conducted to test ROBOBBLE as a data-collection platform and to evaluate interactive form-making engagement among a small group of students. The platform was shown to be successful in engaging all of the participants in this pilot study and expanding their creative design capacities over time. Future work using ROBOBBLE for larger population studies has the potential to produce detailed data about a wide variety of design preferences, and to incorporate this data directly into computational design process.

Human-Computer Interaction; Form-Making; Human Data; Design Process