Apartment layout software
IDIOM ( Interactive Design using Intelligent Objects and Models ) has taken results from eight years of research in intelligence design support and applied them to apartment layout. IDIOM employs a spatial configuration constraint solver to manage and resolve knowledge in a design space.
Working as part of the research team, at the Laboratoire d' Intelligence Artificielle, Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne, Ruth was able to:
- interview architects in Zurich and Lausanne to ask them how they felt about the software they currently used and what they would want to see in apartment layout software
- shadow architects at work in their offices in Lausanne
- research and identify suitable cases for the library of rooms to be used in the case-based reasoning approach of IDIOM, in collaboration with architects
- capture architectural knowledge to create models that represent local government rules architects must follow when building subsidised apartments and luxurious apartments
- investigate and understand the symbols and architectural representations needed for the graphical-user interface
- program the graphical-user interface in OpenGL/X-Motif which architects would use to interact with the algorithms
- test IDIOM on several groups of architects in one-on-one user interviews in order to evaluate the utility of such a system