Sensory evaluation of past design cases and design candidates for conceptual structural design

At the conceptual stage of structural design, subjective decisions play an important role based on sensory and aesthetic evaluation of the design 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 design knowledge through interviews of human designers. Past design cases are result from hidden reasoning processes and contain implicit design 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 sensory 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 aspects as well as structural design aspects into account. The system is examined for the case of arched bridge design.