Advanced Building Simulation

Trends in building simulation 13
early stage of the design process. No architectural firm would risk relying on in-house
use of designer-friendly analysis tools, because it would take a high degree of expertise
to judiciously apply simplified analyses to non-routine cases (if at all sensible). It
also touches on the issue of accountability for the choice of a particular analysis tool
in a design problem. Modern building project partnering strategies try to deal with
accountability as an integral part of team building and management. Accountability
of performance analyses should be treated from the same team perspective. Designerfriendly
analysis tools have typically ignored this issue by assuming that the nonexpert
designer will take responsibility for use of the tool. The problem with this is
that to the designer, the tool is essentially a “black box”, which does not make any
of its applicability limitations explicit. The above assumption regarding designer responsibility
seems therefore not justifiable.
Figure 1.4 reflects how designer-friendly tools are typically generated by “reduction”
or “boiling down” of expert domain knowledge and expert tool functionality.
The premise is that this leads to the type of tool that can be easily adopted by nonexpert
users in the inner design team. As there is no methodology that guides this
process, tool developers use mostly heuristics in this reduction process. Ideally this
mostly heuristics should be captured in explicit rules and made available to the design
user as part of his conscious decisions in a design analysis scenario. It will be discussed
in a later section.
The once popular research area depicted in Figure 1.4 seems to have been replaced by
the opposite strategy, which is to delegate (“outsource”) design analysis to domain
experts and their (increasingly) complex expert tools. The latter effort concentrates
on an efficient communication layer that supports the delegation of tasks and interpretation
of results. Figure 1.5 shows four distinct versions of this approach that are
discussed here. Whereas designer-friendly tools emphasize the import of “packaged”
domain expertise into the design team, design-integrated tools emphasize the export of
Domain
expertise
Reduction
Expert tool
“Designerfriendly”
tools
Inner
design
circle
(architect)
Figure 1.4 Reduction of domain knowledge in the migration of expert tools to designer-friendly tools.