206 eCAADe 24 - session 5: digital design education Design Analysis Network An educational environment for architectural analysis Bige Tunçer, Sevil Sariyildiz Design Informatics, Faculty of Architecture, Delft University of Technology http://toi.bk.tudelft.nl/ Design Analysis Network (DAN) is a web-based environment for the construction and presentation of a body of architectural analyses in the context of a design studio. We use DAN in order to achieve an extensible and cooperative library of architectural design analyses; searchable by content, and instructional for coming generations of students. DAN also acts as a presentation environment for students, where they can present their analyses to their design instructors. DAN has been used in two iterations of instruction in the second year design studio at the Faculty of Architecture. After its use, we carried out an extensive evaluation of the use of DAN, its useful- ness and how it fts into the educational process, in a laboratory environment. The evaluation results provided valuable insights. In this paper, we describe the DAN environment and its tools, and we discuss its use in the design studio. We also describe its evaluation process and results, the analysis of these results and their conclusion. We conclude with recommendations for improvement to the applica- tion and its implementation within the design studio. Keywords: Architectural analysis; conceptual design; extensible library; design studio education; precedent-based learning. Introduction Design Analysis Network (DAN) is a web-based en- vironment for the construction and presentation of a body of architectural analyses in the context of a design studio. In architectural education, complete and thorough analyses of architectural bodies and objects are indispensable. These analyses cover many diferent aspects of the subject, e.g., physical and contextual attributes as well as geometric, func- tional, typological and organizational relations. The main purpose of design precedent analyses as part of architectural education is to teach students design principles using existing examples. This way of learning has been referred to as precedent-based learning, and is a common method used in the archi- tectural education system (Akin, 2002; Lawson, 2004; Schön, 1985). Precedent-based learning aims at help- ing students learn to understand design principles, formulate, isolate and defne design problems, and to use this knowledge in their design. A study of such precedents can yield, among others, heuristics used by the designer, design principles for various pur- poses and situations, and prototypes from building