ModRule: A User-Centric Mass Housing Design Platform

ModRule: A User-Centric Mass Housing Design Platform

Tian Tian Lo1(✉), Marc Aurel Schnabel2, and Yan Gao3

1 The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shatin, Hong [email protected]

2 Victoria University of Wellington, Wellington, New [email protected]

3 University of Hong Kong, Pok Fu Lam, Hong [email protected]

Abstract. This paper presents a novel platform, ModRule, designed and devel‐oped to promote and facilitate collaboration between architects and future occu‐pants during the design stage of mass housing buildings. Architects set thedesign-framework and parameters of the system, which allows the users to settheir space requirements, budgets, etc., and define their desired way of living.The system utilizes gamification methodologies as a reference to promote incen‐tives and user-friendliness for the layperson who has little or no architecturalbackground. This enhanced integration of a both bottom-up approach (user-centric/player) with a top-down approach (architect-centric/game-maker) willgreatly influence how architects design high rise living. By bridging the gapbetween the architect and the user, this development aims to instill a greatersense of belonging to people, as well as providing architects with a betterunderstanding of how to give people more control over their living spaces. Thepaper also presents an evaluation of a design process that employed ModRule.

Keywords: Mass housing · Collaborative design · Participatory system

1 Introduction

Mass housing has constituted a major concern for city dwellers, especially with theincreasing numbers of city dwellers, resulting in increases in population densities andlimitations of urban land resources. It has, at different levels, become a major topic ofdiscussion, politically as a form of nation building [18], economically in search of waysto provide affordable housing to the masses [16] and using housing as a form of invest‐ment [6], and socially to develop community bonds and identity [1].

Mass housing, as the name suggests, is intended for the masses. Participation inbuilding design can come in many forms [27]. Most of the time, urban plannershave invited government officials, and even the public community, to be involvedin the projects to provide better knowledge of the locals [17]. In the context ofhousing, there are cases [30], such as Okohaus by Frei Otto, NEXT21 by 13 archi‐tects owned by the Osaka Gas Corporation, La Meme, and Zilvervloot by LucienKroll, that demonstrate the possibilities of participation of the occupants. However,

© Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2015G. Celani et al. (Eds.): CAAD Futures 2015, CCIS 527, pp. 236–254, 2015.DOI: 10.1007/978-3-662-47386-3_13

the main industry is still in such a top-down state that the occupants do not havemuch input in the design process. In conventional design of high-rise mass housing,developers will plan based on their experience and market analysis. They will thenproceed with their design based on their visualization and realize it in a profitableand cost-effective manner. In order to provide efficient and affordable housing,modular systems and fabrication techniques are adopted. Developers and architectseven developed standards to further enhance the efficiency and fitness of housingproducts. This has not only suppressed creativity and opportunities for innovationin the housing industry, it has also changed the notion of the home in modern living.

While housing design is being simplified to increase efficiency, family structureshave become more complex. For example, the typical ‘two parents, two children’ familyhas become much less common [4]. This results in many mass housing designs notreacting effectively to multi-facetted social needs, ‘forcing’ these people to live in iden‐tical units designed and prefabricated for efficiency and affordability. Using old Chinahousing as a comparison, these old houses are designed for gatherings of familymembers or even entire families. Now, mass housing is just stacked container boxes to‘house’ families. Modernism and advancement of construction techniques have alsounified design typology so much so that it is currently quite difficult to distinguish theidentity of each mass housing building, even in different countries. Architects have beentrying to elucidate the desires of people [31] and translate them into design: however,the outcome has largely remained the same.

With the advancement of computer-aided, -generated, and -supported architecturaldesign, novel possibilities have emerged to allow the user to participate in mass housingarchitectural design. User-centric design processes [11], such as the ‘Barcode housingsystem’ [32] are such early attempts. However, their full potential has not been exploitedin order to allow full participation and individual design variations of the occupants. Atpresent, most of the computational methods address only a fully parameterized design,i.e., they are mainly generated by a top-down approach and are controlled by architectswithout, or with only little, involvement of the users. It has been a well-established praxisto offer a housing design that highly engages occupants. These were generated by usingnon-digital methods [2], and subsequently mostly do not exist in large scale masshousing. Currently, sophisticated computational systems can aid architects in theirchoices of designs, while at the same time allowing for customized mass production ofhousing that is economically viable [13].

Design tools, such as Rhino-Python™ script, Grasshopper, and Autodesk Revit™that focus on Building Information Modelling (BIM) could aid architects in providingalternative and better solutions for housing design. The abovementioned designconstraints and issues can be re-examined to liberate architects in the process. Byadopting open-source systems and open-collaborative design strategies, this researchexamines the need to develop a platform for a bottom-up design approach that allowsfor mass-customization, and maintains efficiency and cost-effectiveness in the housingindustry.

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2 Open Design in Mass Housing

In product development, open source, as a philosophy, promotes universal access viafree licenses to a product’s design or blueprint, and universal redistribution, includingallowing subsequent improvements to be made to it by anyone [15]. Opening the sourcecode enables diversified customization to further develop the original products to breakthrough the limitations of the initial creators of the source codes, i.e., collective intelli‐gence for innovation and development. Open source has been nurturing the IT industryfor developing programs. Consequently, different virtual communities have formedaround the source code.

Open Source Architectural (OSA) is an emerging paradigm describing new proce‐dures for the design, construction, and operation of buildings, infrastructure, and spaces.Drawing from references as diverse as Open Source Culture, avant-garde architecturaltheory, science fiction, language theory, etc., it describes an inclusive approach to spatialdesign, a collaborative use of design software, and transparent operation throughout thecourse of a building’s and city’s life cycle [35].

In the architectural field, the ideas and the approaches of Open Source Design havebeen borrowed for years. However, it could not yet produce a new practice of architec‐ture due to the complexity of the architectural industry, including but not limited todesign, procurement, construction, and numerous other intertwined issues. The recentWiki-house could only deal with the simplest house solutions, without truly exploitingthe power of collective design with participation of the end users for collective housing,i.e., the type of architecture that requires negotiation between multiple users, thedesigner, and the stake holders.

Open building is an approach for building design that was promoted by JohnHabraken (1961) and was recognized internationally during the 1960s to constitute anew wave in the architectural field. The idea of a bottom-up design approach is not new.Specifically, Habraken proposed two main domains of action - the action of thecommunity and that of the inhabitants. Without the individual inhabitant, the result isusually uniform and brutal, which can be seen in most mass housing projects currently.On the other hand, the community, which in this case involves the designers, is necessaryas well. Without design control, the spontaneous result will be chaotic and disturbing.Achieving a coherent balance between individual participation and top-down designmanipulation is challenging, as it involves all parties during the building process, whichis ideally led by the building makers, i.e., the architects.

Building design can be divided into three levels of decision-making: the tissue, thesupport, and the infill. They are separate, yet dependent on each other. The town fabric(tissue level) constitutes a higher level than the buildings, positioned within the townfabric. Buildings can be altered or replaced, while the town fabric remains consistent.The buildings, in turn, can be divided into the base buildings (support level) and the fit-out (infill level). The higher level (support) accommodates and limits the lower level(infill), which in turn determines its requirements towards the higher level [9]. On everylevel, there is an ‘ultimate customer’: the consumer on the infill level, the housingcorporation or developer on the support level, and the municipality on the tissue level(Fig. 1).

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Fig. 1. Open building (John Habraken, 1961)

“Open design” is made possible from the two previous definitions; open sourceprovides information, and open building provides the methodology. The main charac‐teristics in open design are that professionals and laypersons are on equal footing; onlythen can communication and collaboration occur smoothly. Any stakeholder who sharesan interest in the design will be able to influence it.

Open design examines the two main aspects, social optimization and technical opti‐mization, which cannot be separated. “A professional design also incorporates the socialviews of the professionals and therefore implicitly includes their social group optimum.And a social design incorporates the technical views of the non-professionals, thusimplicitly including their technical group optimum.” [41].

Mass housing is one of the building typologies that requires open design. Theoutcomes from the design process should not be dictated, but rather communicated.Much housing that is built by architects or governments is based on past experience, andproven concepts and methods. For example, new urban areas in Amsterdam appear tohave come from this process due to the authorities following rules and proven designs,creating dissatisfaction among the residents [41]. Although it is in an urban context,mass housing is the same. In fact, housing demands much more individuality, as it aimsto house a single family compared to urban areas, which serve the general public.

3 Collaboration of Open Mass Housing Design

Collaboration poses an enormous challenge, especially in the mass housing context. Asspatial preference is very personal, conflicts are sure to arise and are mostly difficult toresolve. This is usually because the decision-making models in current practice are all‘black box’, in which the control unit is closed and often fixed [41]. In order for collab‐oration to work, the decision model should be a ‘glass box’ instead, in which the decisionvariables and parameters are open and transparent.

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To find a means to achieve collaboration between the various stakeholders and thearchitects is not simply to create a digital platform for them to communicate. This couldeasily be accomplished with technology or a social network platform. The main objec‐tive is to understand how mass housing design can be ‘simplified’ into simple rules andparameters for the stakeholders to engage in the design process easily. The variousstakeholders in this research are given higher priority than the occupants. BIM iscurrently only focusing on higher authorities, such as government personnel, developers,and contractors. Occupants who are actually the ‘real clients’ are usually not involved.Therefore, this research will focus on the facilitation of collaboration between the occu‐pants and the architects (Fig. 2).

Fig. 2. Collaboration between occupants and architects

Considering this objective, there are sub-questions that need to be addressed. Sincethe focus is on the occupants, there are some social aspects that need to be examined.Especially in the mass housing context, many sensitive issues could hinder this research.Instead of resolving these issues, this research aims to increase those possibilities. Onesuch possibility is the introduction of a computational platform to engage the occupantsat the early stage of the design process to build up the community bond. By setting theparameters optimally, the platform could achieve a balance such that there is fair playamong everyone. The controls have to be optimized so that the collaboration of theoccupants will not dictate the design too much, which might cause the design to losecontrol, yet will not be too constrained to the extent that participation is meaningless. Inaddition, these parameters have to be simplified, such that anyone can easily understandthem to ensure the possibility of collaboration. Another sub-question is how to enable thestakeholders to change their decisions during any point of the design process. For an opensystem to work, the goals and criteria of the occupants have to be incorporated. This must

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also be done in such a way that they can reach a consensus at some point. Thus, themodeling process in this case has to be ‘free’, so that it can be discussed, negotiated, andchanged during use. This is where the digital platform comes into play. As the modelingprocess has become part of the design process, with changes becoming constantthroughout, the speed and efficiency of computers is necessary to organize the unstruc‐tured collection of possibilities.

To quite a great extent, these also revolve around the parameters used. The organi‐zation of the design options have to be controlled in an optimized manner such that it iseasy to manipulate, yet manageable at the same time. In addition, the parameters mustalso be controlled such that the design provided will not go out of control yet maintainthe freedom available to achieve individuality among the occupants. Essentially, thisresearch actually focuses on the design parameters and the workflow process that couldencourage collaboration and enhance data management.

4 Studio 1: Preliminary Work (Manual)

To further understand the possible problems that would occur in collaborative design,a preliminary design studio is set up to explore the progress without any digital tools asan aid. The only use of computer software is to generate the final design outcome. Thestudio is conducted with 16 students with various levels of design background. Theyplay the role of designers, designing for a group of occupants which is set by them. Theduration is only one semester, which is usually not enough to conduct a fully detailedcollaboration process. However, it is somewhat enough to obtain data to analyze andunderstand the needs of the process.

4.1 Description

The studio observed the struggle between flexibility and control, i.e., the conflict of thetop-down versus bottom-up approach. It investigated the potential problems faced whiledesigning parts of a building. With each designer having his or her own ideas and goals,the research focus was to monitor their collaboration. Two groups of eight MArchstudents were given a brief summary to examine the parameters of housing designs thatdesigners would tend to choose. The studio was organized into four phases:

Phase One. This phase was with reference to the open building concept, in which thehousing design was divided into support and infill. In a top-down manner, a main archi‐tect (the authors) developed a building form in terms of layout and structure, in this case,typical mix-use building with commercial at the bottom and residential at the top (Fig. 3).The latter, the focus of this research, was fragmented into a certain grid for flexible selec‐tion and customization.

Phase Two. This phase relied on a bottom-up approach, in which each designer actedas a potential occupant with specific demands-and-needs, and a design to accommodatethem. In order to examine how the level of constraints would impact the designers’choice, two groups of eight designers were given different sets of parameters to follow

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during the design process (Fig. 4). In a grid system, the designers arranged the massingunits into habitable spaces. Functioning as a potential occupant, each of them had thechance to choose their neighbors.

Fig. 4. Parameters for the two groups (Serdar, 2014)

Phase Three. In this step, collaborative decision-making for the unit distribution, circu‐lation and common area organization, and green/planted area allocation were observed.The designers assessed their options.

Phase Four. At this stage, the design addresses the façade part of the building. Eachdesigner had to decide on opening types and material. Privacy issues were taken intoaccount, which necessitated reassessing the decisions made in the previous stages. Themain architect would step in to maintain a semi-controlled process.

4.2 Studio Progress and Outcome

The designers could change the constraints as they saw fit, as long as both the wholegroup and the main architect (the authors) agreed. Especially in the first group with moreconstraints, some constraints had to be removed in order to open up more space for

Fig. 3. Setup of the design

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more optimized design outcomes. Regarding the group without much constraint, newrules were developed to ensure a certain ‘style’. The constraints in each group were thencompared to determine the type of parameters, so that the main designer could definethe overall building level. This allowed an optimal control versus freedom by which theindividual designer’s creativity was enhanced.

Under the condition of a plan layout fixed by the main architect, the designers weregiven a number of unit cubes to fill up the plan. The designers then worked together togenerate a circulation such that each space was accessible. Safety and fire escape issueswere considered minimally. The basic requirement was that the circulation should reachthe core. The main architect then assessed the designers for moving to the next stage(Fig. 5). The more the discussions continued, the more the cubes shifted around.

Problems occurred constantly, as well. For example, crashes of model components,inconsistent plan organization, and issues of privacy due to windows placementsoccurred. At the same time, the main architect would request each group to provideadditional public spaces or to increase the porosity of the building for more ventilation.Physical models were built for better and faster simultaneous assessment. This encour‐aged another level of discussion, which might necessitate returning all of the way backto the planning stage (Fig. 6).

Fig. 5. Manual collaboration process from using colored cubes to allocate desired space to spatialplans

Fig. 6. Design proposal of a mass housing building assembled using colored cubes after one weekof discussion

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After every conflict was settled, the façades were designed individually. One of thegroups established that each façade had to have strong vertical elements. They also triedmore parametric relationships through computational tools, such as Grasshopper, whilethe other group focused on virtual visualization and physical modelling (Fig. 7).

Fig. 7. Final design results of the two groups

At the end of the studio, a survey was given to every designer to obtain feedbackwith respect to this design methodology. Although they encountered many difficulties,95 % of them expressed the desire to use this design method, if available, to design aplace of their own in the future.

5 Studio 2: System Development (Computer-Generated)

The information collected from the first studio was used to design a digital platform.The objectives of this platform were that the design parameters could be controlledbetter, communication could be recorded, and data collection could be managed moreefficiently.

5.1 ModRule: Mass-Housing Design Platform

By integrating the concept of open architecture, we developed a collaborative designplatform, named “ModRule”. By setting the best rules and parameters, the modularsystem is able to work diversely to generate a wide variety of design options for everyindividual occupant. It is a system that allows the architect to work more closely withpotential inhabitants. The setup, therefore, is quite different from a normal designprocess. In ModRule, the housing design process is divided into four parts: (i) the overallform; (ii) the spatial layout of units; (iii) structure; and (iv) architectural components.The architect uses ModRule to plan a framework within which prospective users of thesystem are engaged (Fig. 8).

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Fig. 8. Workflow of ModRule

The ModRule platform (version 0.1), although it is divided into two main groups,i.e., the administrator for the architects and the public for the users, has three kinds ofinterfaces: (i) admin interface – in which the architect sets the initial design rules andparameters; (ii) public interface – in which the public interacts with the model to ‘design’its desired living space; and (iii) admin-watch interface – in which the architect commu‐nicates with the public and oversees the whole collaboration process with data gatheredfrom each individuals’ movement.

Admin Interface. The administrator interface (Fig. 9) is where the architect prepareshis or her framework of the design. With reference to most games, “gridding” the planshelps to simplify the collaboration process. The architect can grid the plans with respectto his or her plan geometry, i.e., it does not need to be a square grid if the architect isdesigning a unique housing plan.

Next, the architect sets the parameters of each grid, giving each grid a value for anyfactors that are desired by the inhabitants. For example, the most apparent parameterwill be the cost of each grid. The architect can also set the daylight factor, sky-viewfactor, privacy, and views. In addition, some grids can be set as “fixed”, in which userswill not be able to select them. These are mainly spaces, such as the core of the building,the circulatory systems, utilities, and even public spaces where sole control would belongto the architect.

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Public Interface. Users only see the plans of the buildings. Certain information, suchas orientation, available view types, and amount of sunlight is indicated in the diagramas part of the model. Through the interface (Fig. 10), the users first set their targets orfactors that contribute to their desired home design.

Fig. 10. Public interface

In any collaboration process, it can be assumed that conflicts will exist. To addressthis, an interface in ModRule 0.1 appears for any conflict that a participant has withother users. Negotiations are then necessary. A resolution of the conflict can be nego‐tiated by referring to the pre-established target values of the participants. The architectacts as “judge” in this case and facilitates a successful solution of the conflict.

Admin-watch Interface. In the administrator interface, there is an additional feature,in which the architect can oversee the entire “playing” process (Fig. 11). The interfaceis quite similar to the public interface. Every conflict is visible, and the architect wouldhave to consider the targets of each user to provide the best win-win situation foreveryone involved. For example, the user with “view” as the first target will have ahigher priority to choose units with a high view value compared to another user with“view” as the second target. However, if the former user has already achieved 80 % ormore of his or her target, the latter would then be given priority to achieve his or hertarget.

Fig. 9. Administrator interface

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Fig. 11. Admin-watch interface

After all of the prospective inhabitants fulfil their targets, the architect moves on tothe next phase, in which every individual user plans his or her interior spatial layout.The process is simplified such that users with no knowledge of design will still be ableto utilize it fully. The users will only need to drag the room types, make the connections,and the plan will appear immediately.

5.2 Studio Progress and Outcome 2

The second design studio was conducted in ModRule 0.1. There was no group of indi‐vidual designers. Each designer was responsible to setup his or her own parameters andrules. Moreover, no constraint was defined beforehand, so that they were freer to setuptheir design than was the case in the previous studio. Since the setting up requires acertain level of understanding of rule-setting and parametric design thinking, thedesigners, MArch students, were exposed to a series of programs.

Firstly was ‘Prison Architects’, a game designed for people to design their ownprison. Although it is a game, the rules set, the parameters, the design components, andeven the spatial relations are setup very comprehensively for the players to design theirown prison. This game relates to BIM to a great extent. For example, by telling thesystem what space it is, the players can only include certain furniture and require certainamounts of utilities, such as water and electricity. Although it is as complex as archi‐tectural design, the way that they provide guidance and requirements for each spatialtype enables the players to design the prison without much difficulty. However, as simpleas it may be, players still have to play a few times in order to truly grasp the wholegameplay. This is very similar to housing design, in that the players should ‘play around’and configure their living space as much as possible to determine which one best suitstheir needs and works out practically. Yet, this is in the end still a game, and the resultis just a two-dimensional plan with agents moving around.

Secondly, the designers were introduced to ‘Starlogo TNG’, a system developed bya research group at MIT to teach programming to children. The interface is designed tobe very intuitive, yet the interaction with the system is very rich. The objective in thisexercise is to allow the designers to have some hands-on experience with setting up

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rules. To gain more established skills for programming, coding in Processing Program‐ming Language was taught.

ModRule 0.1 was then a prototype, and therefore many design setups had to beestablished manually. So, the designers will build a general massing form, and writedown a detailed plan to prepare for the ‘gameplay’ (Fig. 12). The rules are set quitegenerally so that the gameplay can be more flexible, which as the design progresses,the rules might change to allow the design to diverge to a more specific outcome.Initially, every designer will have to design one overall form. With the experiencegained in the previous exercises, the designers can even design the roles of each playerso that the gameplay can be more interactive and simulated. The interesting part is thatthere is one designer who over-sets the rules, and therefore there is basically little orno freedom for the players to choose their desired spot in the building design. Not onlydid the designers set the parameters, the unit types are also specified for every rolesuch that the players are just finding suitable spots to place their units (Fig. 13). Theoutcome is very limited, and the players experienced difficulty most of the time. Theresult was very similar to what the designer planned.

Fig. 12. Rules and parameters set by one of the designers

After every designer has set his or her design framework and parameters, discussionand even trial play is done with each design to rate its advantages and disadvantages interms of flexibility and constraints of the set parameters. One design is then chosen(Fig. 14) for further development into a full design building. Everyone played the specificrole assigned by the designer of the chosen design to achieve the requirement. For

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example, a family of four should not be located beside a single family who hates children,an elderly family is preferably located at the lower level and closer to the loft core to havebetter access to the ground level, etc. In order for every role to fulfil their desired livingenvironment, another round of discussions and negotiations has to be performed. Thedigital platform enables the design to change and adjust easily. The parameters enhancedthe negotiation with a clearer understanding of each other’s needs and criteria. Lastly, thedesigners will return to do what they do best – design the units for the role that they played.The detailed plans are then generated from the abstract units to define the function of thehouses. The outcome (Fig. 14) was successful to a great extent, as the demands of everyrole are almost fulfilled.

As compared to the previous preliminary study, the designers showed better under‐standing in rule-based collaborative design. The exposure of various games andprograms before introducing ModRule 0.1 gave the designers a better understanding ofthe purpose and flow of ModRule. During the planning of their rule sets and parameters,the designers know what to look for to ensure collaboration and a design language to becommunicated. As compared to the previous study, the previous group took a longertime to reach the stage of generating rules. In addition, the rules generated by the previousgroup caused quite a lot of conflict among each other and a substantial amount of timewas spent to have the design adjusted and refined. For the current group, however,although the users only played a role that did not reflect what they would really demand,fewer conflicts appeared, as the players attained their targets and aims. The only setbackwas that the architects need to have a different design thinking (computationally) to beable to set up the model parametrically to allow this collaboration to work. A post-design

Fig. 13. Rules and parameters set by another designer

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interview conducted with both groups of designers also proved that with the help of adigital platform, the designers have an easier and more effective way to engage with theusers.

6 Further Development

Remote Discussion. ModRule is designed to host discussions between experts andlaypersons. To encourage participation, gamification techniques are exhausted in thefirst version. Further improvement requires these methods to be more prevalent in boththeir interface types and structure. Gamification provides intrinsic motivation for theplayers to interact with the system and collaborate with other players. The next versionis planned to focus on designing Points, Badges, and Leaderboards (PBLs). In theprevious studio work, the designers often needed to meet physically, i.e., remote discus‐sion occurred only at a minimal level. To test the impacts of collaboration from differentdestinations, ModRule 0.2 will use PBLs to encourage virtual discussion during theprocess.

Virtualization-and-Visualization. ModRule 0.1 is substantially lacking in visual capa‐bility and setting up the context of the design. The current studies are done by designersimagining the site condition. The availability of views, the amount of daylight, andorientation are all drawn on paper and referred to during the collaboration process. Evendesigners participating in the research studio have difficulties imagining it. One devel‐opment is to fuse the system with a visually advanced software which relates very closelyto BIM – Fuzor, which is an interactive and real-time virtual reality visualization andevaluation plugin for Revit™ developed by Kalloc (2014). To be able to answer the

Fig. 14. Final outcome of the chosen design

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research question more directly, visual enhancement is necessary. The aim is to providea much more visually clear model so that the public can understand the design andobjective intuitively instead of requiring an explanation of the details of the models,since the public is not architecturally trained and the current abstract building form isquite difficult for the public to understand. The availability of a visualization of siteenvironment and conditions will aid the public to set their desired living condition moreclearly (Fig. 15), and hence enable the research to be conducted with much more fruitfulresults.

Fig. 15. Screenshot of user interacting with model in Fuzor – a Revit-Plugin by Kalloc

Developing Spatial/Parametric Relationships. Last, but not least, our research focusis mainly on turning the rule-based design system of ModRule 0.1 into more parametricrelationships. In other words, Space Syntax methods exploited in the previous two designstudio works will be enhanced with parametric spatial relationships through shapegrammar. ModRule 0.2 will be primarily focused on remote discussion and visualiza‐tion. However, with the third version, our target is to integrate shape grammar into thesystem.

7 Conclusion

ModRule is a user-centric mass-housing design platform. Mass-housing includesdifferent levels of understanding. It is designed and developed to promote and facilitatecollaboration between architects and future occupants during the design stage of masshousing buildings. But it is much more than just an architectural design instrument; itis also social, political, and economic. Its aim is to bifurcate the decision-making processtoward the end-user. The system utilizes gamification methodologies as a reference topromote incentives and user-friendliness for the layperson who has little or no archi‐tectural background. Therefore, ModRule focuses on different aspects to translate adesign environment into a digital platform and to improve on remote control discussions,

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visualizations, and profound parametric design techniques. The collaboration toolinstills a greater sense of belonging to the people, as well as giving the providing archi‐tects with a better understanding and control of how to give people more control overtheir living spaces. The adopted open-source strategy and open-collaborative designapproach of this research developed a platform for a bottom-up design methodology thatallows for mass-customization, and maintains efficiency and cost-effectiveness in thehousing industry. Future developments of ModRule will allow a better connection toBIM software and a refinement of the algorithm allowing more parameters to be set.The here presented studies have shown that ModRule not only enables stakeholders toengage seamless in a collaborative process, but also that the resulting design successfullyexpresses the design desires of users and architects leading to a novel architecture.

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