Design Tools for Laypeople

"from experience to design"

Our focus at House_n is not so much on smart tools, as it is on smart users. We want to create environments and tools that help homeowners recognize their preconceptions and reflect on their needs and behaviors. We want to assist homeowners with translating their experiences in use to the language of design, so that they can better communicate with builders. Finally, we want to elevate the expertise of homeowners, so it can inform industry and most importantly, so homeowners can have a sense of ownership over not just their homes, but also over the design ideas that created them.

Apartment Customization - Online Demo

Simple example of a customization interface for the design of multi-family apartments. Users can select from bathroom and kitchen options and drag and orient partitions to divide up the main bedroom and living room space.

Some basic questions to ask: What do laypeople create when given the option of customization? Are there unexplored options? Are there obvious solutions? Do users make assumptions about what is possible?

We would like to collect data on what solutions people construct. We would also like to introduce Bayesian expert critics, evaluation tools, and a front-end reflection/priming/data collection interface to permit a deeper level of engagement.

Kitchen Design - Online Demo

Our original goal was to think about how to incorporate principles of usability and accessibility into homes.Wwe realized that builders won’t do this automatically. Instead, the homeowner must be active and able to argue for the ideas that are important to how he or she lives. Unfortunately, most design tools oriented to laypeople either expect them to think like designers or simplify their role to basic aesthetic decisions. They don’t exploit the expertise of the homeowner.

We want to elevate that expertise by first, helping homeowners to reflect and make explicit their needs and goals, evaluate how this knowledge of self and activities applies to space, and communicate their ideas in an operable way by creating a layered description of their design that they can share with builders, designers, and suppliers. We see this happening in a cyclic fashion, as homeowners reformulate their goals in reaction to the description they are creating.

For the kitchen design tool, we begin with a “good guess” expert design, associated with the user’s responses to some initial questions. We then provide evaluation and tinkering tools to help the user shape the design to meet their needs.

In addition to the more traditional critic-style tools, based on predefined rules, we have explored analogy tools, intended to help the user describe the design in more personally intuitive terms – an example is thinking about the distance between the sink and the cooktop not in terms of spatial metrics, which would not have a lot of meaning to most people, but in terms of the number of steps required to walk between them. Other tools are intended to situate the user within the design, to think about use issues, such as reach or visual contact. Adding a level of verbal and visual description on top of the base design is intended to help users answer the question – “what story do I want to tell with this design?” – in other words, “what scenarios should this space support.”

People

• Jennifer Beaudin - tools to enable laypeople toreflect and learn about living practices to inform design
  
  
• Reid Williams - intelligent home design evaluation, expert computational algorithms for design
  
  
• Xiaoyi Ma (alum) - home design rules for accessibility and usability