HUMAN-COMPUTER INTERACTION IN THE
FORM-MAKING PROCESS
SALEH KALANTARI
1
, EBRAHIM POUSTINCHI
2
and
NOOSHIN AHMADI
3
1
Washington State University, United States of America
1
saleh.kalantari@wsu.edu
2
University of Kentucky, United States of America
2
ebrahim.poustinchi@uky.edu
3
University of Idaho, United States of America
3
nooshin@idaho.edu
Abstract. Many elements of architectural design are becoming auto-
mated, and the boundaries between design, construction, and use are
increasingly blurred. These developments have produced concerns that
our design processes might outrun “human factors” in our search for nov-
elty and automation. At the same time, however, this new technology
can also improve our opportunities to develop human-centric environ-
ments. This paper describes the creation of an interactive form-making
exhibit called ROBOBBLE, and the use of this installation to engage
users in design while collecting data about their architectural prefer-
ences. The ultimate goal of the ongoing project is to learn more about hu-
man form creation and architectural evaluations, and to integrate those
findings into computational design algorithms and pre-design toolkits.
A pilot study was conducted to test ROBOBBLE as a data-collection
platform and to evaluate interactive form-making engagement among a
small group of students. The platform was shown to be successful in
engaging all of the participants in this pilot study and expanding their
creative design capacities over time. Future work using ROBOBBLE
for larger population studies has the potential to produce detailed data
about a wide variety of design preferences, and to incorporate this data
directly into computational design process.
Keywords. Human-Computer Interaction; Form-Making; Human
Data; Design Process.
1. Introduction
The exponential growth of information-processing technology has given rise to
an increasing reliance on computational approaches in architecture. These ap-
proaches often remove important aspects of the design process from direct human
P. Janssen, P. Loh, A. Raonic, M. A. Schnabel (eds.), Protocols, Flows and Glitches, Proceedings of the
22
nd
International Conference of the Association for Computer-Aided Architectural Design Research in Asia
(CAADRIA) 2017, 529-539. © 2017, The Association for Computer-Aided Architectural Design Research
in Asia (CAADRIA), Hong Kong.