Theoretical analysis on effects of room arrangement on inhabitant behaviors

Interior arrangements influence inhabitant behavior and the usage of the room. This paper proposes a framework that encourages designer-inhabitant communication in case of interior arrangement. From an ecological point of view, interior arrangement and basic actions such as standing, walking, or sitting effect each other. According to our perceptions at places and situations, we spontaneously take appropriate actions; we don't bump into shelves or walls. The actions we take changes our subjective view of the environment, which means a view of the room arrangements interacts with our behavior. We analyse interactive effects between environmental changes and our behaviors based on novel fuzzy sets: the constraint-interval fuzzy set (CoIFS), which provides us with symbolic representation of space usages. The CoIFS enable us to analyse a use for an indoor space, because it shows a sort of "pattern" with appropriate metrics which measures relationships between the indoor space and our behaviors. In this paper we adopt metrics based on the inhabitant behavioral criterion, which measure how s/he tends to use a place as pathway like and be stuck with there. They are vary from individual to individual, so that a personality of the inhabitant can be reflected to evaluation. This paper reports the computational simulation of this analysis that verifies that our framework could be applied to accumulate stylised room arrangements as "patterns" of room use. The "pattern" will support a process in a collaborative design, particularly its interaction in a conceptional phase such as brainstorming sessions.