Sara Eloy

ISCTE-Instituto Universitário de Lisboa | ISCTE · Department of Architecture and Urbanism

This paper focuses on the objective study of emotions, namely, fear induced by architectural spaces, by sensing and statistically analysing some physiological signals of users experiencing Virtual Environments (VE). For this, a virtual building was designed considering the presence of stairs and ramps as architectural elements that could affect use...

The research presented here aims to develop a methodology for rehabilitating the existing housing stock to meet the new needs of dwellers in the current information society and the consequent need to integrate information, communication, and automation technology into living areas. This paper focuses on the use of a transformation grammar in the re...

This chapter focuses on the development and adoption of new Multimedia, Computer Aided Design, and other ICT technologies for both Architecture and Computer Science curricula and highlights the multidisciplinary work that can be accomplished when these two areas work together. The authors describe in detail the addressed educational skills and the...

In this paper we consider the architectural task of the rejuvenation of cities consisting of the large scale renovation of regular apartment buildings. It is argued that ICT, and specifically shape grammar systems, provide the means to take up this task by refurbishing the apartments in these buildings in an individualized way, thus avoiding large...

In architectural research the SPT 2017 challenge of understanding things by their grammar has been taken up. Grammar systems have, for instance, been developed for analysing the design principles of types of architectural artefacts as Palladio villas and Queen Anne houses. The understanding these analytic grammars give of the artificial world may a...

The inhabitants' participation in their houses' design process is critical for the customization of houses to their needs and aspirations and, thus, their satisfaction. The provision of mass-housing customization can be addressed using digital technologies, as they offer the generation of a wide range of solutions that can respond to the inhabitant...

In Slovenia, the existing organised housing infrastructure for people over 65 years of age is insufficient and lacks diversification. Older people are often homeowners, many of whom dwell in large, underused single-family houses that require adaptations. Some have the potential to be transformed into small co-housing communities of 3–6 older people...

In revolutionizing the type and the speed of information available, digital globalization has reshaped perspectives and cross-border actions in various domains worldwide. However, these knowledge-intensive flows have scarcely influenced practice around heritage in least developed countries (LDCs). Historical biases, exacerbated by systemic inequiti...

This paper presents an analysis of space perception and how visual cues, such as landmarks and sound, are perceived and impact people's behaviour while exploring a given outdoor space. The primary goal of the research is to investigate how auditory sensations and visual stimuli influence people's behaviour in outdoor built environments. Our techniq...

The economic and social impacts of robotic construction in Architecture, Engineering, and construction (AEC) are hard to assess and quantify without physical in situ testing, which is expensive and time-consuming This paper presents a methodology for the simulation of robotic construction technologies, namely drones, in a human-machine cooperation...

As the world ages, the built environment requires special attention to assist this growing part of society and therefore the update of urban design guidelines and urban policies is required. The goal of this study is to provide an overview of existing literature regarding emotions and perceptions from older people related to the outdoor built envir...

Citizens are the daily users of urban spaces and their facilities. It is important that they collaborate with local authorities for effective management, development, and maintenance of the cities they live in. Public participation although important is still developing in several European cities because its implementation poses difficulties. In th...

Advances in robotic construction are evident and increasing every year, bringing present and potential improvements. However, the economic and social impacts are hard to assess and quantify without physical in situ testing, which is expensive and time-consuming. This paper presents a methodology for the simulation of robotic construction technologi...

The current paper explores the impact that an augmented reality shopping assistant may have on consumers’ emotional and cognitive responses, and how it would affect their buying behaviours. A prototype of an application to assist consumers inside a supermarket was developed using HoloLens glasses. A total of 85 participants were invited to walk‐thr...

Purpose Customization is a paradox in architecture, providing necessary modernization for buildings but potentially damaging their architectural integrity. In this paper, the authors introduce the Inhabitant-Driven Customization approach for avoiding this paradox; this approach lets inhabitants design the customization from options created by archi...

This study offers critical reflections on the sustainable development of African settlements by considering as a case study the fisherman settlement Fernão Dias, located on the northern coast of São Tomé Island. In the 1920s-1975, Fernão Dias was a shipment port area of Rio do Ouro, which was one of most important agro-industrial plantations among...

Transhumanism is a movement that explores the possibilities that arise from integrating technology in the human body. Neurostimulators and smart prosthetics are some of the technologies that may soon change the way Humans interact with their surrounding environment and enhance their well-being. The current paper presents a framework for stakeholder...

This paper presents the topic of non-institutional old-age housing responding to the needs of older people craving both community and independence. This is done in the context of the potential transformation of existing Slovenian single-family houses into co-housing units for community-based ageing that promotes socialising, resource sharing, and r...

Space Syntax and the theory of natural movement demonstrated that spatial morphology is a primary factor infuencing movement. This paper investigates to what extent spatial morphology at diferent scales (node, community and global network) infuences the use of public space by micromobility. An axial map and corresponding network for Lisbon’s walkab...

Virtual Aesthetics in Architecture: Designing in Mixed Realities presents a curated selection of projects and texts contributed by leading international architects and designers who are using virtual reality technologies in their design process. It triggers discussion and debate on exploring the aesthetic potential and establishing its language as...

Video submission - https://ieeevr.org/2021/program/videos/#V1001

In this chapter we consider computer tools for architectural design based on shape grammar design systems, and evaluate the advantages and disadvantage of handing over these tools to inhabitants for the design of their apartments. This evaluation is qualitative by considering the values of inhabitants, architects, and cities that are affected by th...

In this paper we present and assess tools for visualizing architectonic modifications of existing housing in co-design projects with inhabitants. These tools should enable inhabitants to explore and understand design variations of alterations of their houses. This contribution is part of ongoing research on the use of artificial realities for suppo...

This work analyzes the possibilities of interaction between the built environment and its users, focused on the responsiveness of the first to the emotions of the latter. Transforming the built environment according to the mood, feelings, and emotions of users, moment by moment, is discussed and analyzed. The main goal of this research is to define...

This paper refers to the presence of visual communication elements in public spaces using interactive multimedia surfaces. The state of the art, the development of a proposal, and its evaluation are presented. The interactive surface applies to school of music “Escola de Música do Conservatório Nacional,” to which a design project was done in an ac...

In this paper we present and assess tools for visualizing architectonic modifications of existing housing in co-design projects with inhabitants. These tools should enable inhabitants to explore and understand design variations of alterations of their houses. This contribution is part of ongoing research on the use of artificial realities for suppo...

This work analyses the possibilities of interaction between the built environment and its users, focused on the responsiveness of the first to the emotions of the latter. Transforming the built environment according to the mood, feelings, and emotions of users, moment by moment, is discussed and analysed. The main goal of this research is to define...

This study focusses on how people who are not familiar with the traditional methods used to represent architecture understand architecture design projects. The main objective of the study was to assess the client's level of comprehension of a design project presented using traditional representation methods in comparison with a method based on the...

In architecture, the individual needs and preferences of the end users need to be achieved in order to ensure a successful design. Standardized houses have been for long the reason for inhabitants' lack of satisfaction. The participation of inhabitants in the design process of their own houses is a crucial aspect to address housing customization, h...

This paper aims to explore the possibilities that robotic technologies, namely robotic arms and drones, bring to architecture and to the construction sector. The developed research was based on a literature review regarding drones, robotic arms and hybrid automatic construction solutions. The paper starts by presenting a brief resume about the robo...

Em arquitetura o diálogo entre o arquiteto e o cliente e os utilizadores finais do espaço projetado é de extrema importância para a concretização de um projeto que responda às expetativas do utilizador. Desse diálogo deve fazer parte uma participação ativa do utilizador final no processo de conceção do projeto que vai aumentar o seu envolvimento co...

This edited book gathers research studies presented at the 5th International Symposium on Formal Methods in Architecture (5FMA), Lisbon 2020. Studies focus on the use of methodologies, especially those that have witnessed recent developments, that stem from the mathematical and computer sciences and are developed in a collaborative way with archite...

O surgimento do avião como elemento influente na visão dos arquitetos do movimento moderno do século XX transformou a forma de conhecer e interpretar a paisagem, refletindo-se numa metodologia distinta de planeamento e interação com o território. No seculo XXI, esta relevância da aeronave perpetua-se com a emergência do veículo aéreo não tripulado...

Intervir em edifícios existentes e outros espaços construídos requer, tal como acontece no projeto de edifícios novos, o total controlo sobre o espaço no qual se vai intervir. Um projeto baseado em premissas incorretas é um fator primordial para o insucesso de uma intervenção. O controlo que é necessário ter num projeto de reabilitação arquitetónic...

We present an Environmental Analysis and Safety Advisor system capable of identify the environmental barriers and hazards found in the homes of elderly people. This augmented reality tool runs on a portable computing device and can be used by informal and formal caregivers without specific knowledge of Accessible Design, to evaluate the safeness of...

Physiological arousal has been increasingly applied to monitor exploration (or navigation) of a virtual environment (VE), especially when the VE is designed to evoke an anxiety-related response. The present work aims to evaluate human physiological reactions to safe and unsafe VEs. We compared the effect of the presence of handrails in the VE in tw...

In this paper we consider computer tools for architectural design based on shape grammar design systems and evaluate the advantages and disadvantages of handing over these tools to inhabitants for the design of refurbishments of their apartments. This evaluation is qualitative by considering the values of inhabitants, architects, and cities that ar...

This chapter focuses on the development and adoption of new Multimedia, Computer Aided Design, and other ICT technologies for both Architecture and Computer Science curricula and highlights the multidisciplinary work that can be accomplished when these two areas work together. The authors describe in detail the addressed educational skills and the...

This paper presents a post-handover shape grammar for introducing inhabitants wishes in the transformation of individual houses of the Malagueira housing complex by Álvaro Siza Vieira in Évora, Portugal. The presented research includes a case study developed in the context of the workshop Gramática da Forma em estudos de habitação - análise, geraçã...

The current study intends to highlight the most relevant studies in simulated realities with special attention to VR and marketing, showing how studies have evolved over time and discussing the findings. A text-mining approach using a Bayesian statistical topic model called latent Dirichlet allocation is employed to conduct a comprehensive analysis...

Virtual reality environments have long been used in studies related to architecture simulation. The main objective of this paper is to measure the sense of presence that different virtual reality devices provide to users so as to evaluate their effectiveness when used to simulate real environments and draw conclusions of people's behaviors when usi...

This chapter focus on the development of mobile applications in a research strategy that combines computer sciences and architecture and urbanism. The main goal of our research is to develop mobile applications that help specific target people in daily life situations and that clearly contribute for advances in the fields of computer sciences and s...

Resumo O objetivo principal deste artigo é o de apresentar as gramáticas da forma enquanto ferramentas de análise urbana e de geração de soluções para intervenções em projeto urbano nas cidades. As gramáticas da forma, que surgiram nos anos de 1970 com o artigo seminal de Stiny & Gips, são utilizadas para analisar estilos ou linguagens de desenho (...

This work presents a Genetic Algorithm (GA) approach to produce automatic designs for modular houses: Shaper-GA. A set of architectural design rules defining a language of design is incorporated into the GA fitness function. When possible genetic drift or local convergence might be occurring, the method starts an adaptive mutation rate to overcome...

My House Designer aims at the development of computer aided design systems that automatically design house layouts according to the inputs given by the user of the system, namely the inhabitants. We are developing two different computational approaches, both based on shape grammars: A_Shaper (procedural knowledge) and Shaper_GA (Genetic Algorithms...

This paper introduces the special issue “Advances in Implemented Shape Grammars: Solutions and Applications” and frames the topic of computer implementations of shape grammars, both with a theoretical and an applied focus. This special issue focuses on the current state of the art regarding computer implementations of shape grammars and brings a di...

This paper discusses the formalization of Alternative Shaper, a Spatial Grammar supplemented withprocedural knowledge for supporting design generation. The nondeterministic process style perspective supportsan exploratory and flexible specification of designs and the use of predicates relating shapes allow the confirmationof shape spatial restrictions...

This paper aims to explore the possibilities that robotic technologies, namely robotic arms and drones, bring to architecture and to the construction sector. The developed research was based in an extensive literature review, in the conceptualization of three experiments to be done with drones and in interviews with Fabio Gramazio, Tobias Bonwetsch...

This chapter focuses on the development and adoption of new Multimedia, Computer Aided Design, and other ICT technologies for both Architecture and Computer Science curricula and highlights the multidisciplinary work that can be accomplished when these two areas work together. The authors describe in detail the addressed educational skills and the...

This paper focuses on space perception and how visual cues, such as landmarks, may influence the way people move in a given space. Our main goal with this research is to compare people's movement in the real world with their movement in a replicated virtual world and study how landmarks influence their choices when deciding among different paths. T...

The aim of this paper is to focus on the impact that new automatic architecture design systems may have on the buildings' refurbishment dynamic in the city. We argue that this impact consists of increases in the architectural quality of housing and in the social and ecological sustainable renewal of cities. European cities are faced with stocks of...

This paper presents a digital tool that enables the city inhabitants or visitors to acquire in real time, relevant information about several aspects of a given city, augmenting their real experience of the place. We used digital technologies, particularly an in-house developed Augmented Reality (AR) tool referred to as SeeARch,that augments in situ...

Workshop sobre realidade aumentada

Neste artigo discute-se como a era da informação tem vindo a influenciar os modos de interação entre as pessoas e entre elas e o espaço da cidade. A cidade atual é entendida como um conjunto dinâmico de redes sociais, redes digitais e infra-estruturas físicas. As redes digitais de informação e as tecnologias emergentes que a elas estão associadas p...

This paper focus on the development and evaluation of a computer tool that enriches physical scale models of buildings, which are commonly used during architecture and civil engineering design processes. The main goal of this work is to enable designers, namely architects, to use the affordances of the physical scale models, by enhancing them with...

This paper compares the quality of designs generated by shape grammar systems with designs created by professional architects. It describes an experiment in which evaluators rank the quality of preliminary designs for refurbishing Lisbon's Rabo-de-Bacalhau apartments, and that makes plausible that the design quality of the grammar solutions for thi...

Resumo As instalações das instituições de Ensino Superior, que no caso do ISCTE-IUL estão concentradas num campus no centro de Lisboa, são usadas diariamente por vários milhares de utentes, acolhem inúmeros eventos e o exercício próprio da instituição e requerem investimentos constantes de manutenção, renovação e adaptação. Ao contrário de outros a...

AI EDAM Special Issue, November 2017, Vol. 31, No. 4 - Volume 30 Issue 4 - Sara Eloy, Pieter Pauwels, Athanassios Economou

AI EDAM Special Issue, November 2017, Vol. 31, No. 4 - Volume 30 Issue 3 - Sara Eloy, Pieter Pauwels, Athanassios Economou

This paper reports our current research on automatic generation of houses layouts according to future inhabitant's requirements. For that generation we propose the use of a design method based on shape grammars that encodes light wood frame construction guidelines. Two different implementations for the design system are presently under development....

Shape grammars are rule-based formalisms for the specification of shape languages. Most of the existing shape grammars are developed on paper and have not been implemented computationally thus far. Nevertheless, the computer implementation of shape grammar is an important research question, not only to automate design analysis and generation, but a...

This paper describes an augmented reality app running on a Windows tablet that recognizes image features on a city paper map and overlays, in real-time, digital content related to the relevant buildings of the city. The system register in 3D the location of those buildings in the map, enriching the user experience with several multimedia informatio...

This paper focuses on the transformation of housing typologies by using a grammar-based methodology assisted by the use of space syntax measures. In this paper we start by describing three different types of housing buildings regarding their functionality by using syntactic measures. The studied buildings were constructed in Lisbon from the 18th to...

This paper presents usability tests results with real users during the prototype development phase of two applications for seniors care, AALFred and SmartCompanion. To this aim, usability testing was performed considering a Living Lab approach. Seniors were invited to use the applications in an environment that simulates the one they would use the...

Although many shape grammars and corresponding implementations have been proposed, shape grammars are not widely adopted by architectural designers. In this paper, we therefore look for the barriers of implementing and using shape grammars for architectural design. We do this by outlining several implementation strategies of shape grammars, we brie...

In this paper we use analysis tools from Space Syntax and objective observation of the human behaviour, to understand the impact of landmarks in the walking patterns of users of spaces. Our case study was a large exterior public open space (University Campus), in which participants could walk freely and simultaneously be tracked by several sensors....

The complexity of today´s architecture solutions brings the need to integrate, in the design process, digital tools for creation, visualization, representation and evaluation of design solutions. This paper proposes the adoption of a new Virtual Reality (VR) tool, referred to as VIARmodes, to support the architectural design process with an improve...

The use of new computing technologies in architecture design has evolved the working methods and the way designers relate with the space they are designing. To express their ideas, designers use tools such as physical scale models of buildings in urban settings, sketches and rigorous drawings that are often difficult to understand by non-designers....

Research shows that the activation of aging stereotypes has significant effects over older people’s performance across multiple domains. The significance of these results has promoted interventions to change ageist representations in society. However, little is known about the activation of the reversed “outcome-stereotype” link. Therefore, in this...

Em arquitetura, a maquete, seja para estudo ou para a comunicação da proposta de projeto, desempenha um papel fundamental como ferramenta nos processos criativos de planeamento e conceção de projetos. No entanto, existem por vezes dificuldades associadas a esta abordagem, como o sejam, o tempo gasto e os custos envolvidos na sua produção e modifica...