Madeira Life

Today, most people regard the Internet as the foremost source of information in their lives. The Internet is where we make contact, with friends, with organisations and events, with products and places. We book and reserve, buy or sell real products and services. In a way, we could say that the Internet is becoming an interface to the real world. Madeira Life is the ultimate portal of Madeira: it offers the residents and visitors of Madeira a highly interactive, social network with mobile and location-aware access. It is the place to share photos, video, audio, and text, and connect this content to where you are, as author or audience. Read blogs that were written where you are, hear stories and see videos about the place, or simply get information about sales and promotions nearby. You can get it right there, right now. Madeira Life will accompany you all over the island and be your best link with the world.

This project is a collaboration of Lab:USE with both academic and industrial partners:

• Madeira Tecnopolo (science and technology park)
• ZON Multimedia (internet service provider)
• Carnegie Mellon University, Human-Computer Interaction Institute

The project is co-funded by ZON Multimedia and the +Conhecimento fund (Madeira regional government) and has a total budget of 633 k€.

SINAIS: Service Innovations through social Networks, context Awareness and Interaction for Sustainability

HCI is a multi-disciplinary field in which sustainability research is an emerging topic of interest. In this project, motivational theories and research through design processes are applied to understand, motivate, support and encourage sustainable behaviour. The focus is on two domains: Home (referring to resource consumption of electricity, gas and water in residences) and Transport (referring to travel and commuting behaviour). The key enabling technologies and methods that will be deployed in this project include social network analysis, advanced sensors and data processing algorithms, and interaction design. The overall goal of the work is to weave these threads together, to meld sensor technologies and human-computer interaction design with the motivating power of social networks in order to achieve significant changes in the consumption behaviour of communities.

This project is a collaboration of Lab:USE with both academic and industrial partners:

• Carnegie Mellon University, Human-Computer Interaction Institute
• Electricidade da Madeira (energy service provider)
• ZON Multimedia (internet service provider)
• Horários do Funchal (local transport provider)
• Regional Agency for Environment and Energy (innovation promoter)
• Intelligent Sensing Anywhere (telemetry and remote utilities management)

The project will be executed at Lab:USE and at the HCII in Pittsburgh. It is funded by FCT (Portuguese Ministry of Science and Higher Education) with a budget of 573 k€ for the Portuguese part of the project.

Culture's4us

This is an MSc graduation project by two students, Gustavo Fernandes in the Master of Computer Science and Gonçalo Luís in the Master of Telecommunications, both at the University of Madeira. The general objective of this project is to define and develop a new mode of communicating with tourists, pre-travel as well as during their stay at the destination. To achieve this, the project develops a web-based communication platform that is accessible from desktop computers but also targeted specifically at modern mobile devices such as cell phones and pocket computers.

The prototype developed in the project enables fully automatic geotagging of pictures taken by tourists using their mobile phones and uploaded to a server that tracks their travel over the island of Madeira.

Construction Dialogues: The Architect and the Contractor

This is one of a series of projects that aim to analyse bilateral communication in the construction industry. These projects are initiated and managed by the Dutch research foundation JANUS.
This project is the first one in this series. Its objective is to first enlighten the relationship between the two disciplines that are traditionally somewhat suspicious about each other. Then, we analyse why communication is not functioning optimally, trying to answer questions like:

• do architects and contractors trust each other?
• what are their mutual beliefs about characters and intentions?
• what information is currently communicated?
• what is the quality of that communication?
• what communication is actually needed?
• how can the communication be improved?
• and eventually: what ICT means (models, tools, standards) would be needed?

Much research has been done attempting to answer the last question. We believe that it is essential to answer the other questions first, together with practicing professionals, through enquiries, brainstorm sessions, case-studies, and interviews with professionals and communication experts.

Construction Dialogues: The Architect and the Principal

This project was initiated by two of my graduate students, Silvère van Lieshout and Lesley Hamelton, to the model of the above described project. Although it was executed in the context of the foundation JANUS, the main objective was educational as this was the two students' MSc graduation project. The project resulted in the design of an enquiry among institutional principals and among architects that work for institutional principals. The enquiry informs about the professional relationship between these two groups of construction partners and gives insight in their mutual expectations and intentions regarding the communication process, their roles in the design process, the documents to be delivered and discussed, the critical issues in this entire process, as well as the interviewees' visions on possible improvements and the role therein of a variety of technologies.

The Digital Dormer: online building permits

Dormers are the most required modifications to peoples' homes in The Netherlands. A city like Rotterdam, yearly handles about 300 requests for building permits concerning dormers. The costs of dormers are relatively low and therefore the administrative costs will be relatively high. The aim of the project is to improve the quality of the submitted requests and to streamline the process of checking the requests. This is achieved through a website where citizens can 'design' their dormer online and provide all necessary information to automatically check for all building codes. The site also provides additional advise to the citizen regarding the construction, insulation, daylight, ventilation, etc. of the dormer. The citizen using the site can then submit the application for the building permit online. Finally, the construction project can be entered into an online tender, where local contractors can bid for the project.

RFID on the Construction Site

This project is the graduation project by MSc student Glenco Jansen. RFID tags are microchips that can hold information that can be scanned from a distance. They are already widely used in many industries, such as the retail industry, to identify products. In the construction industry, there is not much experience yet with using RFID to identify building elements, such as concrete piles. Glenco will design and execute an experiment to do exactly this. He will also analyse the impact that using RFID may have on the construction process and, in particular, on the administrative processes.

COINS - Product Model for the Civil Engineering Sector

COINS = Civil Objects and INtegration of processes and Systems

The objective of this project is to develop a product model of relatively high level of abstraction for the civil engineering sector (roads, bridges, railways, etc.). In this sector there has been quite some research on product modelling application, but this has been mostly academic and has not led to an accepted standard. This project does not initially aim to establish such a standard, but rather to establish an acceptable working methodology for future development of such a standard.

The Neighbourhood Wizard

The Neighbourhood Wizard (WijkWizard) is the graduation project by MSc student Léon van Berlo. The project comprises a website that allows citizens to evaluate the effects of changes in their neighbourhood. The site can also be used to make people aware of the consequences of the changes that they would like to see in their neighbourhood. It is thus intended as a tool for public services to help them get citizens to participate in urban redesign. Users of the site can suggest changes to their neighbourhood. A Bayesian Belief Network, filled with data from case-studies, is used to predict how these changes will be experienced by various parts of the population.
Léon now works at TNO, Delft.

SwEET - Searching with Experience

One of the main assets of design offices is their knowledge about products, design methods, and construction methods. Mostly, this knowledge is in the heads of people working in the office, in the office's library, and in suppliers' catalogues. However, Internet is becoming an important source for searching for this kind of information.

In this project, we developed a new search algorithm, that takes into account the user's experience with the domain in which he is searching for information. This user-based algorithm for page ranking uses the user's appreciation of terminology to rank pages that are found on Internet. The algorithm can be used to develop a search engine that customises itself to the user's experience. Additionally, the algorithm allows users to share their domain knowledge by making their customised search engine available to others. This opens new opportunities for online expert services and for the development of a so-called corporate memory of information on the web.

A proof-of-concept was implemented in the form of a small prototype search engine. While I believe this algorithm has much potential and I have some great ideas for further development, I haven't found any time for this yet. The algorithm was published at the CAAD Futures 2005 conference in Vienna.

Co-located Collaborative Decision-making Space

This is the PhD research project by Nishchal Deshpande. The objective of this project is to develop a computer mediated, co-located collaborative decision-making space that leads to communication, knowledge acquisition, better shared understanding. These are critical issues for effective decision making in a multi-disciplinary (design) team.

Nishchal: "Over the last decade the level of interest in the field of Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) has grown enormously to support various collaborative activities. Basically they all support argumentation in one or the other way. While many environments do support the process of bringing people into collaboration, the participants often fail to understand each others' activities, knowledge, beliefs or communicating contextual information. My research project results in an interface for the interactive construction of a Qualitative Probabilistic Network (QPN) for 'playing' with propositions and for instant gratification while exploring the model of a (problem) domain but also for enhancing the deliberation of collaborative argumentation, and visualizing the insights of that collaborative discourse to build and support shared understanding."

Multi Agent Systems for Collaborative Design

The objective of this PhD research project by Jakob Beetz is to facilitate the use of external knowledge from various resources and domains in a building design project. At design time, the designer has to take many external factors into consideration that affect the quality and performance of the building - especially in the early phases of the design. Unfortunately though, much of these additional factors are not accessible or take a long time to be calculated.

This project combines product modelling standards (IFC) and semantic web technology (OWL) with multi-agent technology to develop a framework for agents that represent expert knowledge from a particular discipline, such as an HVAC consultant. Agents can also be developed to represent building components that are required to manifest certain behaviour in a building, e.g. a ventilation unit. In both case, the agent is an autonomous software objects that can be given a task in a certain context, such as making sure that the required performance can be achieved in the design.

Digital Support for Collective Private Building Initiatives

The graduation project of Dennis Bottram has led to a prototype website for community-communication in the decision-taking process of private building initiatives. In the Netherlands, private construction of dwellings is relatively expensive. Collective initiatives are therefore increasingly getting popular and stimulated by the authorities. Companies offering management support are appearing, but this is intensive work and costs are high, even for such a collective. Experiments with the website have shown that effectiveness of communication can be increased significantly and decision-taking can be done both more swiftly and on a better-informed basis.

Generating a Long-term Maintenance Planning from a 3D Building Model

In his graduation project, Bas Ekkelkamp developed a methodology and software prototype to compute a long-term planning for building maintenance. The prototype imports a semantically rich building model and applies a new method to compute the degradation over time of the various parts of the building.

CoDesKs: Management and Communication of Distributed Conceptual Design Knowledge in the Building and Construction Industry

The objective of this research project is to develop a technological and organisational framework for the management and communication of conceptual design knowledge in a distributed environment. This framework allows designers to model their expertise and use it in computational design reasoning; it also allows them to share this expertise, enabling them to use each other's design knowledge and reasoning mechanisms. The project has developed the technology and the organisational aspects that are required for designers to build up a common, but distributed, design knowledge base. Technologically, the result is a framework that implements a distributed object model with object-level versioning.

This project was, in the first year, executed at the Instituto Superior Técnico (Technical University of Lisbon, Portugal) and co-financed by Eindhoven University of Technology and the Portuguese Ministry of Science and Education.

Dynamic Information Modelling in Architectural Design

This short project brought together the research efforts of three European researchers in the area of modelling architectural design information. All three researchers recognised the need for a dynamic approach, the necessity for a design model to be conceptually adaptable as design proceeds and more information is becoming available or design decisions are reversed. They also recognised that no assumptions should be made about design methods and that design information models must support various methods. Furthermore, concepts such as space and user activity play an important role in early design stages and must be supported by modelling tools. The success of computer support for architectural design therefore depends on how well it supports a dynamic handling of design information, as well as if it can handle information regarding non-technical issues. The project analysed, compared and evaluated the long-term, independent research projects that were carried out at three European universities: Eindhoven University of Technology, Leuven University, and Lund Institute of Technology. The three projects all addressed the issues mentioned above. While their initiatives were independent and the developments are not formally related, they show strong similarities in terms of objectives, conceptual approach, and methodology.

Decision Support System for Building Refurbishment Design

This was an EC-funded research project under the Brite Euram program, number 4670.

Refurbishment design is a form of design where the existing situation plays a dominant role in the design process. Making use of typical existing situations and preferred refurbishment solutions, the refurbishment design process can be supported by Case Based Reasoning (CBR). This project developed a methodology and decision support system for housing refurbishment using CBR technology. The system is designed and implemented for distributed usage through Internet.

ICT as a Means of Education

ICT and architecture are often viewed as separate subjects, that can also be taught separately. If the goal of teaching is to produce learned designers, then it is necessary to combine both issues into a single course. In this project we innovated a traditional CAD course that suffered from decreasing results. We identified the problems in the existing course and designed measures to be taken to reorganise the contents and didactical approach of the course. The main innovation in the course was the introduction of information and communication technologies (ICT) both in the contents of the course and as a means of education. Abandoning printed images as the result of students' work, the new course required students to create a web page to present their efforts on architectural design, modelling, and visualisation. This had a beneficial effect on the students' attitude and enthusiasm for the course. It also allowed better planning of the course in terms of computer-facilities. The innovated course showed how, when taught in combination, ICT and architecture can strengthen each other.

Decision Making by Conjoint Measurement & Virtual Reality

In this project we developed a web-based application that combined a virtual reality interface for users to experience design variants with conjoint analysis techniques to measure the user's preferences. The advantage of using VR is that users are better able to perceive the proposed designs. The advantage of conjoint analysis is that users are asked to make only a limited number of choices, the results of which are combined in an analytical way to draw conclusions about the participants' preferences.

Visualisation and Manipulation of Dynamic Data Structures in Virtual Reality

The PhD research project of Marc Coomans is about the design of a virtual reality user interface for the visualisation and manipulation of dynamic data structures. The project aims to explore how Virtual Reality can be exploited in applications which involves the manipulation of large graph-like data sets. It leads to the design of a 3D tool with which the designer can directly interact with abstract design information models. This involves an investigation in all aspects of user interfaces: graphical visualisation, interaction, input devices, implementation constraints.

Architectural Product Modelling

This was a relatively small, national Dutch research project which was coordinated by SBR and executed by Calibre Institute in co-operation with VCA, the Dutch association for computer-usage in architects' offices. It was a demonstration-project aiming to show the benefits of product modelling in architecture to end-users and software-developers. The project has resulted in a product model for a specific office-building and in a prototype for architects to fill the model from within a CAD-system. Demonstrations of the project have shown how the model is created using the prototype, and how this information is communicated to a cost-engineer and an HVAC-engineer.

PhD research project: Modelling Architectural Design Information by Features

In my PhD research project the point of view is taken that design requires a dynamic way of dealing with information. Information models that are rigid, that cannot be manipulated in terms of the used definitions and structures of information, are not suitable for adequate support of a dynamic design process. At the start of this project, the need was acknowledged for an investigation of the requirements that must be fulfilled by information modelling tools for the support of creative design. On the basis of these requirements, the efforts on design support, both within the architectural discipline and in other disciplines, have been studied. Product Modelling at first seemed a very promising approach that already started to prove its value in a wide range of applications in the Building & Construction industry. However, it appeared not to meet the specific requirements for design support where creativity and a dynamic way of dealing with information is concerned. From the mechanical engineering discipline, a modelling technology has emerged that, although developed contemporarily to product modelling, has quite a different approach in several respects. This technology, called Feature Based Modelling, allows a designer to produce models that appear less rigid and are based on less presumptions concerning the definition and structure of information describing the design.

In the thesis, the possibilities for application of the Feature Based Modelling technology in the problem area of supporting creativity in architectural design are explored. First, the requirements are surveyed that must be fulfilled for this kind of computer support. Next, the concepts from the Feature Based Modelling approach are reviewed and evaluated in the light of these requirements. An adaptation of this approach to the particular conditions in architectural design appears necessary, this mainly concerns a broadening of the concepts to the wide range of information dealt with in the interdisciplinary field of architecture.

GBa - CAD software package for the Dutch architectural market

In this period I worked on the GBa project. GBa is a Dutch acronym for Geïntegreerd Bouwen Architectuur: Integrated Building Architecture. This project was part of a line of CAD software modules for various disciplines of design, including architectural design, architectural drafting, installations technology, electrical engineering, and urban design. These software tools were developed as an add-on to AutoCAD with many functionalities specific for the Dutch construction market. They were, at the time, the leading CAD package used in architects' offices in the Netherlands.

The project management responsibilities I had in my later years in this company included functional and technical design of the software, planning, budgeting, coordination of implementation and documentation, quality-assurance, etc. To assure that the software answered to the needs of practice, it was defined and developed in consultation with user-groups. As project manager I also participated in the committees of the Dutch association Geïntegreerd Bouwen (Integrated Building) for the development of GB software modules and multidisciplinary CAD conventions and standardisation.