SEED: A Software Environment to Support the Early Phases of Building Design

Abstract

SEED aims at providing computational support for the early phases in building design in all aspects that can benefit from such support. It intends to encourage an exploratory mode of design by making it easy for designers to generate and evaluate alternative design concepts and versions. The tasks supported at the present time are architectural programming, schematic layout design and the generation of a fully 3-dimensional configuration of physical building components like structure and enclosure. A standards processor supports standards and code checking as it relates to any one of these tasks. An object database allows designers to store and retrieve different design versions, alternatives and past designs that can be reused and adapted in different contexts (case-based design). The present paper provides an interactive introduction to the different components of SEED that are currently under development, starting with a statement of goals and a description of the overall systems architecture. See [Flemming 95b] for a more detailed overview of SEED, which includes a comparison with similar efforts that are currently undertaken at other research institutions. Readers should note that this article is best viewed with Netscape version 3 or higher. On the Mac platform, memory problems may arise when Java applets are being loaded. It is suggested that in this case the readers may disable Java and reload the document.