BH-ShaDe: A Software Tool that Assists Architecture Students in the Ill-Structured Task of Housing Design

In this paper, we present BH-ShaDe, a new software tool to assist architecture students learning the ill-structured domain/task of housing design. The software tool provides students with automatic or interactively generated floor plan schemas for basic houses. The students can then use the generated schemas as initial seeds to develop complete residential projects. The main goal of our research was to obtain evidence about whether or not such schemas can be useful to architecture students. A first prototype of the tool was evaluated with 78 students, with positive results. However, the students seemed to demand increased user participation, so they could contribute to generating better quality starting points. A second prototype was therefore implemented, allowing a higher degree of interactivity. The second prototype was evaluated with a new group of 50 students. From the two evaluations performed, it can be concluded that both versions of the tool were able to generate useful starting points (either automatically or interactively) that expedited the design process. Additionally, in the second experiment, we found that neither the nature (automatic or interactive) nor the quality of the starting point seems to have any effect on the perceived quality of the final projects.