19 September 2007: Workshop – Spatial Cognition in Architectural Design

Anticipating User Behavior, Layout Legibility, and Route Instructions in the Planning Process in conjunction with international Conference on Spatial Information Theory (COSIT’07) Melbourne, Australia.

Architects make inferences about the spaces that they are not in. They can infer how multi storey buildings look like by inspecting separate 2D layouts of the floors. They can mentally synthesize separate spaces that make up a building design, and they can create alternative designs by revising the spaces and how these spaces may come together.

Apart from these inferences, architects may also anticipate how residents and visitors of a building will behave in the spaces. They may design a building in such a way that people’s ability to understand the spatial layout of this building is influenced (in a positive or negative way). For instance, the legibility of the spatial environment may in- fluence the way in which routes between locations in the building are conceptualized, mentally processed, and communicated. These issues as well can inform and change the architect’s spatial inferences and decisions in the architectural design process.

Questions to be considered in this workshop include, but are not restricted to:
– How do architects switch between the designer’s and the users’ perspectives during the design process?
– What types of (internal and external) knowledge representations and pro- cesses do they make use of?
– What are suitable computational tools for dealing with the spatial complexity of the diverse spatial perspectives and requirements?
– What means are there to anticipate the way future users of the building will conceive of the building layout?
– Regarding complex built environments, how can the aspect of conceptualizing and communicating route knowledge be integrated in the design process?
– How do spatial / architectural and mental complexity related to each other with respect to building layouts? What are the limits both in the design process and the real experience of the resulting building complex?

Call for contributions
Authors are invited to submit a contribution of 4 to 6 pages as basis for discussions during the workshop (pdf file in Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science format, see www.springer.com/lncs). Please send your contribution to barkowsky@sfbtr8.uni-bremen.de. Accepted contributions will be made available on the workshop web site, unless their authors instruct us otherwise.

Important dates
-30 April 2007 submission of workshop contributions
-15 June 2007 notification of acceptance
-07 July 2007 final versions of workshop contributions
-19 Sept 2007 workshop

More information at http://www.sfbtr8.uni-bremen.de/SCAD