  The aim of this study is to understand what are the collective actions of
architecture practitioners when grouping floor plan designs. The understanding
of how professionals and students solve this complex problem may help to
develop specific programmes for the teaching of architecture. In addition, the
findings of this study can help in the development of query mechanisms for
database retrieval of floor plans and the implementation of clustering
mechanisms to aggregate floor plans resulting from generative design methods.
The study aims to capture how practitioners define similarity between floor
plans from a pool of available designs. A hybrid evolutionary strategy is used,
which takes into account the building's functional program to generate
alternative floor plan designs. The first step of this methodology consisted in
an online survey to gather information on how the respondents would perform a
clustering task. Online surveys have been used in several applications and are
a method of data collection that conveys several advantages. When properly
developed and implemented, a survey portrays the characteristics of large
groups of respondents on a specific topic and allows assessing its
representation. Several types of surveys are available; e.g. questionnaire and
interview formats, phone survey, and online surveys, which can be coupled with
inference engines that act and direct the survey according to respondents'
answers. In the present study, the survey was posed as an online exercise in
which respondents had to perform a pre-defined task, which makes it similar to
running an experiment in an online environment. The experiment aimed to
understand the perception and criteria of the target population to perform the
clustering task by comparing the results with the respondents' answers to a
questionnaire presented at the end of the exercise.

Human-Computer Interaction