Crowd sourced co-design of floor plans using simulation guided games

Abstract

Crowd-aware environment design is a complex combinatorial decision process, where small changes in a design may affect crowd flow patterns in unexpected and potentially unintuitive ways. Existing solutions rely on expert intuition, best practices, or automation. To address the dimensionality and complexity of the design process, we propose leveraging automation and human creativity at a large scale akin to crowd sourcing, within a gamified collaborative design framework. Using our system, "players" (novice users or experts) can rapidly iterate on their designs while soliciting feedback from computer simulations of crowd movement and the designs of other players. Our approach affords a new way of thinking of the solution space in that it inherently supports competitive collaboration, co-design, and crowd sourced solutions. We evaluate our framework through a preliminary user study.