Sam Conrad Joyce

• EngD – MEng (Hons)
• Professor (Associate) at Singapore University of Technology and Design

Active mobility, specifically walking and cycling, have been widely identified as key elements in promoting healthy lifestyles and creating liveable cities. As Singapore incorporates active mobility infrastructure like Park Connector Networks into its planning and policy goals, inter-user conflicts and spatial negotiation become inevitable. In part...

The rapid growth of aviation, especially in Asia, has expanded airport footprints, raising sustainability concerns. To address this, we propose a holistic approach. We combine global network data and machine learning to predict future airport land demand due to new flights, sustainable fuel tech, and land scarcity. Our model forecasts 2050 aviation...

Airports require long term planning, balancing estimations of future demand against available airfield land and site constraints. This is becoming more critical with climate change and the transition to sustainable aviation fuelling infrastructure. This paper demonstrates a novel procedure using Satellite Imagery and Generative Learning to aid in t...

Demographic forces such as population and GDP drive current and future aviation demand. Global demographics are set to change and grow significantly over the next decades, leading to new routes and airports. However, matching airport capacity to demand takes time and foresight and given unknowns in sustainable transport. Stake-holders must understa...

We consider the task of generating designs directly from natural language descriptions, and consider floor plan generation as the initial research area. Language conditional generative models have recently been very successful in generating high-quality artistic images. However, designs must satisfy different constraints that are not present in gen...

The rapid increase in video content production has resulted in enormous data volumes, creating significant challenges for efficient analysis and resource management. To address this, robust video analysis tools are essential. This paper presents an innovative proof of concept using Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) in the form of Vision La...

Introduction Walking is an active mobility option with health and social benefits. Many cities including Singapore are expanding pedestrian infrastructure and creating walkable neighbourhoods. But the connection of neighbourhood walkability and walking behaviour among residents, especially older adults remains less examined. The aim of this study i...

This study investigates the integration of Extended Reality (XR) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) in architectural design, examining their collective impact on design methodologies, stakeholder engagement, and project outcomes. Through a comprehensive review of existing literature, various applications of XR and AI across different stages of archit...

This chapter explores understanding the relationship between spatial configurations of the office, temporal policies, and social interactions and networks. It then validates effective spatial-temporal-social configurations using agent modelling how different office configurations including work from home, hybrid working and new 'club house' type ef...

City Digital Twins (CDT) can play a pivotal role in consolidating and visualising complex urban big data, promoting rapid and informed decision making in contemporary cities. Beyond rich contextual data, these tools offer features like interactivity, 3D models and data visualisation, making them ideal for urban planning and design explorations. How...

In their highly provocative book, The Age of Earthquakes: A Guide to the Extreme Present (2015), Douglas Coupland, Hans Ulrich Obrist, and Shumon Basar explored the impact of the internet and social media on our world. In their work, technology is viewed as transformative, and in many cases, destructive. These effects happen gradually, almost imper...

Rework in Building Design (BD) processes has a multitude of impacts on the performance of construction projects. A Multi-Domain Matrix (MDM) is a modelling technique to identify and analyse the effects of rework and iteration loops on the process and product of complex engineering systems. However, there are fewer MDM analyses on the effect of rewo...

A multi-domain Matrix (MDM) is used to identify and analyse rework loops within the Building Design (BD) process caused by building regulations. To model this process, we used information from official documents, plans of work, email archives, and anecdotal evidence as a case study. Findings reveal that MDM can identify the rework loops caused by b...

Aviation activity has been shown to mirror the expansion of urban centre activity through increased airport-city linkages, infrastructure enhancements, and passenger numbers, all of which have accelerated over the last two decades and specifically within Asia. Aviation supports vital information flow through people and goods and is a key driver of...

Due to exponential aviation demand in the last two decades, and conversely due to COVID19 and environmental pressures, airports have seen pressure to undergo unprecedented levels of transformation which includes upscaling, downscaling, and reconfiguration. For instance, the new Beijing Daxing airport designed to handle over 100 million passengers,...

Design process modelling is well-founded in fields of mechanical engineering, and product design and development but not in Building Design (BD). This paper looks at the selection process when choosing appropriate models for specific BD processes. The paper adapts process model selection criteria from Trauer's work and combines it with anecdotal ev...

There has been an exponential increase in Machine Learning (ML) research in design. Specifically, with Deep Learning becoming more accessible, frameworks like Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), which are able to synthesise novel images are being used in the classification and generation of designs in architecture. While much of these explorati...

The perennial communication gap between architects and structural engineers is well-known. While architects tend to focus on design elements, engineers focus on structural aspects. A pedagogy study was proposed to bridge the gap of communication between architects and structural engineers through reviewing teaching methods for architecture students...

Productivity studies in the AEC industry has gained significant attention in the past decade, however the impact from actual industry application has not kept up. This could be attributed to the focus on construction productivity instead of engineering productivity. This paper presents a systematic literature review on engineering design productivi...

Many design versions are produced during design exploration. However, these versions are typically maintained manually often using an individual's self-determined logic, and thus hamper design workflow when a specific file cannot be located, similar ideas and mistakes revisited, or even loss of a potentially good design direction. These issues, in...

Although parametric modelling and digital design tools have become ubiquitous in digital design, there is a limited understanding of how designers apply them in their design processes (Yu et al., 2014). This paper looks at the use of GHShot versioning tool developed by the authors (Cristie & Joyce, 2018; 2019) used to capture and track changes and...

The concept stage is a crucial time for a project, starting from a site and blank sheet and boldly dictating the design direction and key qualities, which will then be refined over subsequent stages. This chapter explores the application of artificial intelligence (AI). in this stage, and it explains the unique challenges and the demands on AI to s...

Decision-makers across many professions are often required to make multi-objective decisions over increasingly larger volumes of data with several competing criteria. Data visualization is a powerful tool for exploring these complex solution spaces, but there is little research on its ability to support multi-objective decisions. In this paper, we...

Aviation contributes to 3.6% of the world’s GDP (ATAG, 2018). It is expected that this figure is set to double at a projected $5.7 trillion by 2036, of which a third of all the aviation traffic and economy is expected to be contributed by the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) (ICAO, 2018). With aviation in the region growing at 10% eac...

Despite the plenty of data collected through collaborative design exercises in pedagogy settings, very few of these data were utilized for further studies. This occurrence is in contrast with the software development settings where software repositories are often mined to find insights on programmer’s software building pattern. In this work, we imp...

Aviation is in flux, experiencing 5.4% yearly growth over the last two decades, however with COVID-19 in aviation was hard hit, this along with its contribution to global warming has lead to louder calls to limit its use. This situation puts emphasis on how urban planners and technologists could contribute to understanding and responding to this ch...

In this paper, we replicate a foundational study in graphical perception, and compare our findings from using design-centric participants with that of previous studies. We also assess the visual accuracy of two groups, students and professionals, both with design backgrounds, to identify the potential effects of participants' backgrounds on their a...

The potential of parametric associative models to explore large ranges of different designs is limited by our ability to manually create and modify them. While computation has been successfully used to generate variations by optimizing input parameters, adding or changing ‘components’ and ‘links’ of these models has typically been manual and human...

Computing has made detailed design analysis across all engineering domains types easier to produce. This has as a result generated significantly more design data than before. Similarly, tools like parametric modelling, and BIM have also allowed for differentiated design options to be generated faster and at lower human effort than previous design m...

When working with parametric models, architects typically focus on using rather structuring them (Woodbury, 2010). As a result, increasing design complexity typically means a convoluted parametric model, amplifying known problems: `hard to understand, modify, share and reuse' (Smith 2007; Davis 2011). This practice is in contrast with conventional...

During the process of design, copies of files are often stored to track changes and design development or to ensure that previous work will not be lost. In software design field, such process is supported using versioning system, where source code is saved intermittently when features are added or modified for individual or group use. We argue that...

Parametric associative logic can describe complex design scenarios but are typically non-trivial and time consuming to develop. Optimization is being widely applied in many fields to find high-performing solutions to objective design needs, and this is being extended further to include user input to satisfy subjective preferences. However, whilst c...

Design can be described as an exploration of options diverging and converging towards a final result. In the digital realm this process usually happens by copying a design file and continuing to make modifications, creating additional new or different files for different designs. However often design files are simply overwritten and hence the histo...

Good engineering design involves complex decision making; choosing between objective and subjective trade-offs. In practice, subjective evaluations are not only useful for aesthetic input but also accounting for properties which are hard to measure, but are understood intuitively by experienced designers; examples of this are constructability, appl...

There is increasing interest in understanding the use of urban space around heavily trafficked areas like transport interchanges; both in terms of their cultural social commercial use (Cha, 2001) but also in the context of 'last mile' journeys. However, this type of use is often not captured in traditional census, survey or transportation data. Thi...

This paper describes the conceptual underpinnings of a infrastructure currently in development which aims to provide a computational environment for productive and creative human and computer co-creation of architectural design artefacts in an open, networked collaborative system. It identifies some key collaborative activities in design and looks...

The paper discusses a newly developed cloud based design-model version control system for supporting manual and semi-automated generative design via a web-based platform which enables exploration and retrieval of designs and the solicitation of users' evaluations of them to enable interactive genetic algorithms to produce preference optimised desig...

Generative processes and generative design approaches are topics of continuing interest and debate within the realms of architectural design and related fields. While they are often held up as giving designers the opportunity (the freedom) to explore far greater numbers of options/alternatives than would otherwise be possible, questions also arise...

The design and modelling of the walls of the United Arab Emirates Pavilion for the 2015 World Expo in Milan was a rich and complex challenge in shape research, computational design, digital fabrication and considerations for logistics and construction. This paper will focus on how the shape and textures of the walls of the pavilion were developed a...

This paper outlines recent efforts by the author to integrate modern web-based data visualisation techniques into decision-making efforts for structural design projects. It traces the development of data visualisation, detailing powerful new techniques, which exist in modern web browsers, and are already used by many other data-rich professions. Ex...

The best known isotropic membrane stress state is a soap film. However, if we allow the value of the isotropic stress to vary from point to point then the surface can carry gravity loads, either as a hanging form in tension, or as a masonry shell in compression. The paper describes the theory of isotropic membrane stress under gravity load and intr...

During the past decade the construction industry has been witnessing a constant shift in the way it operates. The advances of technology have made possible the adaptation of a more direct, performance-driven design approach based on multi-objective - and sometimes contradicting -- criteria of environmental, structural, economic and aesthetic impact...

Parametric modelling tools have allowed architects and engineers to explore complex geometries with relative ease at the early stage of the design process. Building designs are commonly created by authoring a visual graph representation that generates building geometry in model space. Once a graph is constructed, design exploration can occur by adj...

Multi-objective optimisation can help civil engineers achieve higher performance for lower costs in their designs. This is true whether 'performance' applies to structural strength or energy use, or whether 'cost' measures financial outlay or occupant satisfaction: if it can be quantified it can be optimised in some form. By exploring trade-offs be...

A collection of methods and algorithms are presented which aim to aid in the automatic designing of steel structural frames, under both deflection and stress criteria. A virtual work method is utilised assessing local contributions of members to global nodal deflections. It is the invention of the authors to apply these methods iteratively to indet...

This paper presents an overview of the current developments in people flow analysis in Buro Happold’s analytical group SMART Solutions. The role of people flow analysis has become an established one, within many leading consultancy firms with their own specialist groups supporting the architects and planners in the design of buildings and urban spa...