pART bench: A Hybrid Search Tool for Floor Plans in Architecture

Architectural databases often contain thousands of different floor plans which have either been collected from historical designs or, more recently, auto-generated by suitable algorithms. Searching for a floor plan that fits specific requirements in such a database involves setting a large number of parameters, such as lines of sight, lighting levels, room types and many more. We present pART bench, a hybrid tabletop/tablet tool which allows the use of intuitive touch commands and tangible objects to quickly adjust search parameters, view resulting floor plans and iteratively refine the search. We report on a comprehensive requirements analysis with practising architects, on the design process, and describe our prototypical implementation of the system, both on a tablet and on a PixelSense tabletop device.