Interactive visualisation of the 2000 W buildings design space

Supervisors: Julien Nembrini, Denis Lalanne, Thomas Jusselme

Student: Raphaël Tuor

Project status: Finished

Year: 2016

The increasing requirements on building performance in multiple dimensions such as LCA, electricity demand, heating and cooling demand, etc. makes difficult for architect and engineer designers to get a clear overview on what are the implications of any choice during the design process. To reach the requirements of the 2000 W society, all possible energy spendings need to be comparable in order to trade of between spending energy in construction materials to save energy later during building usage, or the opposite.

By using available building performance simulation tools, it becomes possible to vary input parameters to explore the contribution of each parameter to the overall performance. By systematically covering this parameter space within realistic bounds, the implication of certain parameter choices on the rest of the parameter set to meet the 2000 W constraint can be computed. Given the potentially very large amount of parameters in a real architectural project, the way to present such results in an exploitable manner remains an open challenge.

Building on simulations performed in the context of the Smart Living Lab project, this master project will aim at developing interactive visualizations of building solutions which are compatible with the 2000 W society and thus to support the understanding of the underlying rules and models, as well as the exploitation of parametric building simulation results to help engineers and architects design the buildings of tomorrow.

Keywords: Data visualization, Parallel coordinates, user studies

Document: report.pdf