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Evolving Floorplans

joelsimon.net

11–20 of 110 posts

Re: Evolving Floorplans

#11
post #2

These kinds of tools are mostly about the input constraints, heuristics, and weights. I'd love to see more about this with more practical constraints (rectilinear rooms and hallways, minimum area for cafetaria/gym, etc) and additional heuristics, such as window area in classrooms, number of hallways/intersections for ease-of-navigation, and building costs beyond just material use.

> building costs beyond just material use

Yep. The "optimized" floorplans would be an order of magnitude more expensive to build than the original. I mean, drywall alone would take a lot more time with all the cuts, mudding and sanding more joints. The thought of framing out these walls makes my head hurt.

Re: Evolving Floorplans

#13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably because they definitely don't feel like anything created by a human mind. I'd love to see these visualized in first-person, so I could walk through them and look around.

It's Kafkaesque i think

Only in the sense that it looks like an insect hive, I think.

Re: Evolving Floorplans

#14
post #5

Sure, it looks cool. But there are so many other properties of a home that aren't accounted for in this model (mostly aesthetic ones, like cozyness, feelings of safety/comfort, how the plan interacts with light, etc). One day we'll live in homes with automated floorplans, I'm sure of it. But it won't happen (or at least, we won't be happy about living in such things) until the day we figure out ways to deal with more…

I was at a vehicle AI conference early this month discussing how AI will only output based on the quality of its inputs. And the fear coming out of that conference was if space wasn't correctly dedicated or allocated, the AI will optimize the systems as much as it can to squeeze out every single ounce of efficiency. Qualitative items such as the ones listed are important for customer focused environments, however, I'…

Like I mentioned, I have high hopes modelling vaguer aspects of customer preference can be incorporated by training a model on rendered generative design (e.g. with data from amazon turk), which can then be used as maybe some kind of penalization on the efficiency loss function, multiplied by a weight to give us a choice in the efficiency-comfort tradeoff-space.

There are solutions that I think show potential out there. I don't think our future AI designed world necessarily need to ignore difficult-to-quanitify dimensions like aesthetics. (Though amazon turk is expensive, especially in developer man-hours, so I can understand if that won't always be done.)

Re: Evolving Floorplans

#17
post #2

These kinds of tools are mostly about the input constraints, heuristics, and weights. I'd love to see more about this with more practical constraints (rectilinear rooms and hallways, minimum area for cafetaria/gym, etc) and additional heuristics, such as window area in classrooms, number of hallways/intersections for ease-of-navigation, and building costs beyond just material use.

> building costs beyond just material use Yep. The "optimized" floorplans would be an order of magnitude more expensive to build than the original. I mean, drywall alone would take a lot more time with all the cuts, mudding and sanding more joints. The thought of framing out these walls makes my head hurt.

But would it still cost more if the building were made of prefab-stamped “IKEA pieces”, rather than stick-built? I.e., if you had to build the house 100 times (for a townhouse development, say), and so “factored out” the assembly of the framing and drywall and etc. for each curve and corner, would the labor costs then approach equivalence?

Re: Evolving Floorplans

#18
post #8

I've been in a few apartments that had novelty floor plans without right angles. All of them were terrible. Granted I have not been in one owned by somebody rich or skilled enough to only have custom made furniture.

I’d be curious to see the effect on airflow, though. I’d gladly pay for custom furniture if the design of the house meant never sitting in a cloud of my own CO2 (without any need for fored-air ventilation like in airplanes/submarines/bunkers.)

Re: Evolving Floorplans

#19
post #6

I love this. It makes me believe that our sci-fi future might be more in line with the Timeless Way of Building than with cinderblock utilitarianism. I too would love to see a 3D environment built from these, so we could get a feel for them.

'cinderblock utilitarianism' is exactly in-line with _The Timeless Way of Building_. Four square walls and a peaked roof? Job done for the next 300 years.

Re: Evolving Floorplans

#20
post #6

I love this. It makes me believe that our sci-fi future might be more in line with the Timeless Way of Building than with cinderblock utilitarianism. I too would love to see a 3D environment built from these, so we could get a feel for them.

Did you miss the part about "light on two sides of every room"? These evolved designs seem optimised for nothing that actually matters to human comfort.
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