A study of form-finding by agent based modeling and its applicability in a design process. This work was part of a free project at the DHBW Ravensburg.

Situation

The development and production of consumer goods in companies may be compareable to a process flow. Starting from a basic idea, a potential product passes through a creative process repeatedly involving employees of different departments until it finally reaches the end of the chain as a finished product. In conventional office buildings the spatial separation of the involved actors at a specific point of the process entails long lines of communication. This does not reflect the aforementioned chain of progressive creation. A flexible adaptation to divergent information flows of different projects is also not possible.

Concept

Form finding by freely positionable workplaces driven by project-specific requirements and social interaction. A support framework allows free positioning of individual workplaces. The communication of several workplaces at one height level represents a process node in the flow of information. Employees from various departments can dynamically combine themself to form working groups. Due to the selected position of the agent between the poles of “agent’s department” and “agent’s working group” as well as the lateral constraints of available space, the resulting structure forms a spiraling architecture communicating its inherent information flow.