Navigating the Intangible Spatial-Data-Driven Design Modelling in Architecture

Over the past few decades, digital technologies have played an increasingly substantial role in how we relate to our environment. Through mobile devices, sensors, big data and ubiquitous computing amongst other technologies, our physical surroundings can be augmented with intangible data, suggesting that architects of the future could start to view the increasingly digitally saturated world around them as an information-rich environment (McCullough in Ambient commons: attention in the age of embodied information, The MIT Press, Cambridge, 2013). The adoption of computational design and digital fabrication processes in has given architects and designers the opportunity to design and fabricate architecture with unseen material performance and precision. However, attempts to combine these tools with methods for navigating and integrating the vast amount of available data into the design process have appeared slow and complicated. This research proposes a method for data capture and visualization which, despite its infancy, displays potentials for use in projects ranging in scale from the urban to the interior evaluation of existing buildings. The working research question is as follows: “How can we develop a near real-time data capture and visualization method, which can be used across multiple scales in various architectural design processes?”