Reflection on the Design Process
The project and course served as a valuable insight into procedural design and building generation. It was specifically interesting to look into the impact of the different weights and programs on the growth of the building. Due to time constraints and the lack of in depth expertise, our project could benefit from following considerations.
Firstly, the involvement of local stakeholders early on in the design process could serve as a valuable tool in understanding what the Schieblock needs and how best to add buildings in this area. Since this project only makes use of hypothetical stakeholders, this would be a valuable addition.
Secondly, understanding the needs of future residents would be key to implementing our design. Here, it would be very valuable to have several focus groups with potential future residents and the group of interest (students, starters, elderly) to understand their needs and wants. The results of this would be especially interesting in the weighing process of the project. Specifically, different Multi-criteria decision analysis methodologies could be made use of to understand how the residents value criteria proportionately. This would benefit our current project, since the weights contain a high bias, which would be minimized through this.
Thirdly, to further improve the building generation, further analyses could be run to improve the complexity and variety of considerations. Due to time constraints, this was not feasible for the current project, but would be recommended for future implementation. At this point, it must also be considered that adding more complexity is not always beneficial, since this can lead to misleading placement of functions. This was the case with our laundry program. Our laundry program only had one main criteria, which was being close to the student housing, however, no requirements regarding the criteria and analyses. Nonetheless, the laundry was configured close to the elderly units. This is an example of how adding more complexity is not always beneficial.
Lastly, the current design could and should be downscaled as a next step. Meant by this is a more in-detail creation of hallways, as well as the housing unit and program layouts. Here, the way that each studio is made up with different rooms and utilities would be visualized. Integrating additional innovative design elements, such as water collection on every floor and the corresponding roof, should also be discussed. The reality and feasibility of the implementation of our design should be discussed, since currently it is only based on the procedural generation.