Computational design can identify greater efficiencies across the built environment, enabling more sustainable cities, according to researchers at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) in Sydney.

A suite of design applications is in development at UNSW to help architects and urban planners optimise their designs for more sustainability. The apps use machine learning to target the reduction of construction waste and urban heat, lowering the embedded carbon footprint of buildings.

According to lead researcher Hank Haeusler, director of computational design at UNSW’s School of Built Environment, the tools will help reduce the environmental footprint of buildings by helping professionals make more sustainable decisions around size, scale and materials.

“We’re applying a computational eye to these global problems,” said Haeusler. “Landfill, pollution, the way different materials contribute to climate change, as researchers we have a moral responsibility to look into this.”

Haeusler works at the intersection of digital technologies, architecture and design. His expertise lies in computational design, including AI and machine learning, digital and robotic fabrication, virtual and augmented reality sensor technologies, and smart cities.

“The construction industry produces an enormous amount of waste,” said Haeusler. “Ten to fifteen per cent of all the materials you bring onto a construction site are going straight into the bin. It’s wasteful, it’s bad for the environment, and it doesn’t align with the United Nations’ sustainable development goals.”

Urban overheating arises from human activity such as waste heat from industry, cars and cooling, building with heat-absorbing materials and rapid urbanisation, and adversely affects health, energy, and the economy. Haeusler said computational design and machine learning uplifted the capacity to solve these global problems.

“In a city, there are thousands and thousands of data sets,” he said. “It’s like a jigsaw puzzle. Transport, urban design, economics modelling, urban heat, water, electricity – cities have super-complex systems. As humans, we might understand these issues in isolation, but machine learning helps us unpack the broader context and consequences of different design decisions.”

He said machine learning could interrogate vast sets of fine-grain data in real time to analyse and evaluate alternatives. In a design context, it can identify efficiencies and promote sustainable practices, in this case reducing the heat and waste produced.

“Within the UNSW heat reduction app, you design your street and then a computer programme does the calculation in the background based on intelligence learned from its data sets,” he said. “Then it tells you, it looks like here, at this intersection, it will get hot because of the physics that shape urban heat islands.”

The designer can then adjust the building height, put in green spaces and shade, change the road width and adjust other variables to improve the building’s environmental footprint.

Similarly, the waste reduction app calculates the materials required for the design and so the designer can adjust its size and scale to reduce waste offcuts. Its calculations are populated with data from public hardware sites.

By translating foundational research into practical industry tools, these applications make sustainable practices more achievable, Haeusler said. As such, they democratise architecture and design practices, uplifting the benefits of research and development for a broader market.

“Rather than replacing cutting-edge research, their focus is on uplifting practitioners’ working knowledge to affect real-world impact,” he said.

Haeusler is also working with architecture studio Cox Architecture to develop research projects and promote educational opportunities for students. Giraffe Technology started as one such project, and is now an SME working in a digital architectural and property development application.

With funding from Atlassian’s Startmate accelerator programme, the one-time start-up grew out of a series of research projects with staff at Cox Architecture that aimed to make local council development data sets more accessible and facilitate feasibility studies for western Sydney.

Giraffe Technology is like a map of the world on a browser primed for architects, which means anyone with access to the internet can use it. It taps into GIS mapping to populate streets, buildings and vegetation. Its interface is driven in the background by computer scripts that enable users to automate design processes and generate 3D architectural models. Users can conduct site analyses and calculate proofs-of-concept in real time.

They don’t need to have any programming skills, said Haeusler. It’s like Google: it’s not necessary to understand the complicated algorithms that drive the search engine to use and recognise its benefit.

Now an established business, Giraffe Technology is introducing an app store to house computational design tools from diverse sources. Like the app store with Apple products, apps that list on Giraffe’s platform leverage its legal framework, data privacy and monetary systems, pain points for emerging developers, Haeusler said the waste reduction tool and the urban heat island tool would appear soon at the app store.

He said computational design would become more relevant, particularly with the rise of virtual representations of existing cities.

In ten to fifteen years, he said digital twins would become an operational part of cities used to improve their performance, from trouble-shooting traffic issues and to investigate the feasibility of proposed developments to exploring new energy options and other planning issues.

“Cities will never be,” he said. “They will always be becoming.”

Using the power of computational design and 3D printing technology, Haeusler predicted there would be settlements beyond Earth this century. In fact, his team at UNSW recently signed a memorandum of understanding with Australian building and construction company Luyten to begin researching and developing a 3D printer called Platypus Galacticas capable of building on the Moon.

“With the possibilities of 3D printing, we don’t need to think about housing anymore in the traditional way,” he said. “Through computational design, we can take all kinds of scientific data, feed that into a computer programme and instruct a remotely controlled 3D printer to build complex geometric structures here on Earth and, one day, the Moon.”

Haeusler said that doing computational design research with the Moon would have direct learnings that could be applied to challenges on Earth, such as climate change and affordable housing.

“The knowledge we generate from building on the Moon can be translated directly into building housing for extreme climates such as heat or for addressing housing issues in remote indigenous communities, both topics we investigate in parallel,” he said.