3D modeling Logs Based Design Process Mining Method and Its Application for Design Education

Abstract: Computer aided 3D Modeling design software has an important role in today's design industries from wide range of areas on various project stages. In previous design studies on architectural design process, the conclusions were always draw upon data from like textual records, pictorial representations, interviews, and semantic coding, which inevitability own shortcomings of subjectivity, laboratory-based data, and not fully controlled environment variables. In response to the above problems, we turn to another kind of data possibility: the event logs generated from 3D modeling software platform during computer aided design process. Since each step of design operations is recorded in the event logs, the design behavioral sequences can be fully tracked. A method for design process study is hence developed based on event logs mining. With quantitative, objective and tractable characteristics, the method can help studying the problem-solving process of designers in CAD environment and summarizing design cognition conclusions. In this paper, we attempted to apply this method to a real college course in the School of Architecture at Tsinghua University. More than 100 junior students major in architecture participated in the course. Rhinoceros 3D(Rhino) was chosen as the CAD tool in this study for its popularity and wide-use in architecture and design educations. By building up a data recording plug-in in Rhino, our proposed method realizes digital supervision and data collection for the entire designer modeling design process, allowing students as researches to extract information including operational command name, command time, 3D object generation information, designer annotative and retrospective records and etc.. The method and this developed plug-in tool can automatically record and filter the large amount of data generated in 3D modeling process, which simplifies the data collection process, improves the quality of the data, and provides a new kind of data source and research method for the study of design process in CAD environment. Our course-based case study lead to some interesting conclusion and provides window for students to understand and perceive the design process through data mining based on event logs.

Keywords: Design education, CAD, Event logs, Data mining, Design cognition

DOI: 10.54941/ahfe1002384

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