Research

Architectural education aims to enhance students’ ability to decide on design trade-offs between safety and other building performance factors, but empirical explorations continue to lack valid exploratory methods. To overcome this shortcoming, we investigated the effects of agent-based simulation on students’ design trade-offs between safety and other building performances, such as daylighting and construction costs. To this end, we developed a visual perception-equipped evacuee behavioural model that incorporated responses to building layouts and fire circumstances, including smoke and sprinkler operations. In five building information modelling (BIM)-based empirical design projects, the simulation enabled students’ systematic examination and explicit data-driven trade-offs by providing both quantifiable analytics and representing the responsive behaviours of evacuees under fire circumstances. Compared to norm- and regulation-based extrapolation, the simulation also allowed students to conduct trade-offs easily and decide valid alternatives, with high fulfilment of design intention. We also found that the unexpected behaviours of fire evacuees, such as bottleneck inside smoke and affordance exploration, also influenced students’ trade-offs and decision-making. In this paper, we address the applicability that visual perception-equipped evacuee simulation is a potentially viable method for inclusion in architectural design pedagogy.