Casey R Hickerson

PILOT Poster (675 KB)

With specialized knowledge and experience, a human can predict the interior layout of a building from exterior features, e.g., doors, windows, and ornaments. Automating this task through machine intelligence would have a wide variety of practical applications while presenting an effective model for design space exploration. This project explores ways of automating interior layout prediction using knowledge of a building's exterior features and knowledge of its style as embodied in a shape grammar. Since a shape grammar generates all possible instances of a style, establishing constraints at the outset of analysis significantly reduces the number of possible configurations that the system must examine. Consequently, we are investigating layout prediction as a two-step process: using exterior features to gather hints about the interior layout adjacent to the building's exterior and then using these hints to guide heuristics derived from the shape grammar to guess more complete layouts.

My primary responsibilities for this project were to devise the shape grammars that describe various types of buildings within the system's target environment and to help design the general heuristics that guide the layout prediction process.

Principal Investigator: Ramesh Krishnamurti
Graduate Students: Kui Yue & Casey R Hickerson
Colleagues (USACE CERL): Francois Grobler (PI), Ajla Aksamija, Hyunjoo Kim
Sponsor: US Army Corps of Engineers, Civil Engineering Research Laboratory, Champaign IL

Publications

F Grobler, A Aksamija, H Kim, R Krishnamurti, K Yue, CR Hickerson. 2008. "Ontologies and Shape Grammars: Communication between Knowledge-Based and Generative Systems." DCC '08: Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Design Computing and Cognition. JS Gero & AK Goel, eds. Springer Netherlands.  View PDF

K Yue, CR Hickerson, R Krishnamurti. 2008. "Determining the Interior Layouts of Buildings Describable by Shape Grammars." CAADRIA 2008: Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Computer Aided Design Research in Asia. W Nakapan, E Mahaek, K Teeraparbwong and P Nilkaew, Eds. Chiang-Mai: Pimniyom Press. 117-124.  View PDF