SENSORY EVALUATION OF PAST DESIGN CASES AND DESIGN CANDIDATES FOR CONCEPTUAL STRUCTURAL DESIGN

At the conceptual stage of structural design, subjective decisions pla y an important role based on sensory and aesthetic evaluation of the d esign object, since they are hardly considered in the following stages in which objective technical decisions are dominant. Such subjective decision-making is vague and it is hard to acquire its reasoning as de sign knowledge through interviews of human designers. Past design case s are result from hidden reasoning processes and contain implicit desi gn rationale of the human designer. A case-based approach can be used to deal with such a subjective process. In this article, we discuss a method to identify the relations between structural attributes and sen sory evaluation from past design cases and to utilize them for design candidate generation. A design assistant system is considered for the conceptual design of a structural system by taking sensory design aspe cts as well as structural design aspects into account. The system is e xamined for the case of arched bridge design.