Design space exploration through force-based grammar rule

Design exploration frames the process of understanding design as a challenge and helps taming its complexity. It is a creative, but also paramount, process, that flourishes diversity, emergence and variability. The approaches used during this exploration stage can widen, or narrow, the domain where design variants can be found. Computational tools have shown their great potential to explore design in a fast way. However, the digitalization of the process is not sufficient to ensure the generation of radically new designs and subsequently not guaranteed to explore the full range of the design space. The design of architectural forms, that are structurally relevant, shares the same challenges and risks. Additionally, it introduces equilibrium constraints.This paper presents a design framework, which fuses force-driven grammar rules for the generation of unprecedent spatial structural systems that go beyond any existing catalogues of mathematically known structural typologies. Operating on a rule-based level rather than on a variable-based level, allows the incremental transformation of the model and the backtracking to previous steps, while static equilibrium is always retained. The acquired transformations are possible to be slightly or highly constrained along with the designer’s intended exploration preferences.