Collaborative Research: Merging Human Creativity with Computational Intelligence for the Design of Next Generation Responsive Architecture

This project will create a process combining the creativity and experience of human designers with computational intelligence to increase the novelty and effectiveness of designs for environmentally responsive building technologies. Building operations account for a large portion of infrastructure energy footprint. Adaptive building components, such as origami-inspired adaptive facades, are a potential pathway to reduce this cost, by enabling building exteriors to be reconfigured based on light or thermal conditions. Yet, a major challenge holding these concepts back is their inability to be systematically designed. Moreover, there is a critical need to provide early and interactive design feedback to better facilitate more useful, nuanced, and ecologically responsive ideas. This research will create tools that promote creativity, knowledge sharing, and collective workflows that lead to effective technology in all regards, from aesthetics to function. The work will simultaneously create a new educational track for architecture and engineering students to learn about and test their ideas for adaptive building concepts. This educational effort is fully integrated into the research by providing a testbed and the critical dataset to inform the computational tools. Thus, this work will create new design processes for origami-inspired structures and seed the upcoming generations of designers with the skills and penchant to explore adaptive structure concepts. The overall goal of this work is to establish a new strategy to integrate architectural design processes and human-derived designs with physics-guided machine learning and computational design optimization, and to evaluate this strategy on the application of origami-inspired responsive architecture. The integrated computational-experimental research effort includes three thrusts: 1) establish a coupled human-computer design strategy for component-level origami-inspired adaptive structures to simultaneously meet multiple external environmental interaction goals and intrinsic structural requirements; 2) create a computational framework to evaluate the performance of origami-inspired adaptive structures, and augment their design based on human input and computer guidance; and 3) establish a framework for the introduction of new structural concepts in an architectural design process and application of this framework to identify emergent origami-inspired concepts for adaptive structures. The project will establish an overarching framework that accelerates and widens innovation through a novel combination of computational tools, which not only connect to the user, but can also augment human creativity. In addition to the creation of new computational toolsets, this work will generate unique datasets for leveraging a spectrum of machine learning tools and discover and validate new folding patterns with uniquely beneficial performance. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.