Design space exploration was a cluster within Smartgeometry 2014 which took place at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, China, from 14-19 July 2014. The theme of the event was Urban Compaction and it had two parts, four day workshop which different clusters work on separate projects, and there is a day of public talk and a day of symposium at the last day.
I was part of Design space exploration cluster which aimed to create an evidence based planning process that relies on advanced simulation and design synthesis methods. The champions of this cluster were Dr. Reinard König, Matthias Standfest, Lukas Treyer, Zeng Wei and Bernhard Klein from ETH Zürich and ETH Singapore, Future Cities Lab.
In the first day, the team introduced us a framework which stores information generated from different computational tools in one database called LUCI (Lightweight Urban Computation Interchange). We are given a task to compute some design parameters for a design space in Rochor, Singapore.
The calculations included parking availability, privacy some space syntax features such as centrality, betweenness. The system generates design "solutions" for the given criteria using evolutionary processes.
To compute the given parameters we mainly used Grasshopper and Processing. The computations are transmitted to a central database via an API. You can see a timelapse video of the workshop.