Function & Action Verifying a functional program in a game-oriented environment Gabriel Wurzer 1 , Antonio Fioravanti 2 , Gianluigi Loffreda 3 , Armando Trento 4 1 Vienna University of Technology, 2,3,4 Università degli Studi di Roma “La Sapienza” 1 http://www.iemar.tuwien.ac.at, 2 http://www.dau.uniroma1.it 1 wurzer@iemar.tuwien.ac.at, 2 antonio.fioravanti@uniroma1.it, 3 gianluigi.loffreda@uniroma1.it, 4 armando.trento@uniroma1.it Abstract. The finding of a functional program for any kind of building involves a great amount of knowledge about the behavior of future building users. This knowledge can be gathered by looking at relevant building literature (Adler, 1999; Neufert and Neufert, 2000) or by investigating the actual processes taking place in similar environments, the latter being demonstrated e.g. by (Schütte-Lihotzky, 2004) or new functionalist approaches of the MVRDV group (Costanzo, 2006). Both techniques have the disadvantage that the architect might assume a behavior which is seldom experienced in real life (either through lack of information or by failing to meet the building user’s expectations). What is needed is a verification step in which the design is tested on real users. We have devised a game-like environment (Figure 1a) in which it is possible to capture the behavior of future building users in order to verify the relevance of the design even at a very early stage. As result of applying our approach, we can find previously overlooked usage situations, which may be used to further adapt the design to the user’s needs. Keywords. Requirements Checking, Participative Design. Introduction Lawson states that “...the best test of most design is to wait and see how well it works in practice” (Lawson, 1997). We feel that this ‘reality check’ has to be done well before the building goes into operation, in order to meet the future building users expectations. It is an often quoted dilemma that people cannot state their expectations about the daily life routine in a new building without reference to some sort of solution. As architect, taking assumptions in the form of an initial functional program is good, what is missing is a validation step in which the preliminary design is verified on real users. We have devised a game-like environment in which users can enter their would-be behavior in a planned building, based on their normal work and life routine. Our key goal is • to let building users provide feedback on the presented design (e.g. what they think is still missing, see page 367) • to be able to tell which planned functions are actually used (see page 369) and at what time or because of what cause As game setting, we take the preliminary design (Figure 1b) which the architect has annotated with function map (refer to Figure 1c): For us, functions are spatial and have an influence boundary in which they can be utilized. We adopt the notion of function as proposed in (Wurzer, 2009), in which functions are further detailed into basic elements of work routine (e.g. kitchen into cook, prepare, store etc.). As final input into our program,