Conceptual Architectural Design at Scale: A Case Study of Community Participation Using Crowdsourcing

Architectural design decisions are primarily made through an interaction between an architect and a client during the conceptual design phase. However, in larger-scale public architecture projects, the client is frequently represented by a community that embraces numerous stakeholders. The scale, social diversity, and political layers of such collective clients make their interaction with architects challenging. A solution to address this challenge is using new information technologies that automate design interactions on an urban scale through crowdsourcing and artificial intelligence technologies. However, since such technologies have not yet been applied and tested in field conditions, it remains unknown how communities interact with such systems and whether useful concept designs can be produced in this way. To fill this gap in the literature, this paper reports the results of a case study architecture project where a novel crowdsourcing system was used to automate interactions with a community. The results of both quantitative and qualitative analyses revealed the effectiveness of our approach, which resulted in high-level stakeholder satisfaction and yielded conceptual designs that better reflect stakeholders’ preferences. Along with identifying opportunities for using advanced technologies to automate design interactions in the concept design phase, we also highlight the challenges of such technologies, thus warranting future research.