Measuring the Usability and Effectiveness of CAAD Tools and Applications

Computer Aided Architectural Design (CAAD) decisions and judgments have been at the heart of architectural design practice. Despite the increasing popularity of computer aided design applications, measuring the decision making of designers empirically remains elusive. Past research claiming usefulness of the CAD has relied largely on anecdotal or case studies that are vulnerable to bias. The study reviews results of prior investigations. The relatively few laboratory experiments report hardly any empirical results regarding the measurement of CAD decision making. The study provides an overview of the literature of existing measurement methods that have been used in psychology and neuroscience to assess individual variations in design making, and highlight these different measurement methods’ strengths and weaknesses. We conclude with a comparative evaluation of the different measures and provide suggestions regarding their constructive use in building realistic theories of designer’s decision making measurement.