Customised Floating Neighbourhoods: Design Interfaces for Non-experts and Designers to explore Emergent Floating Formations

Urban water spaces, lakes and rivers have played a key role

in socio-economic and spatial development of cities throughout centuries.

There is an increasing trend in creating floating neighbourhoods

and spaces on water worldwide. Design of floating urban spaces is complex;

it requires incorporation of advanced computational tools to ensure

correct interpretation of environmental conditions to make proper

design decisions. In this study, we focus on an investigation of possibilities

of floating neighbourhoods to adapt according to rapid changes

of environments and demands of their end-users to address deeper engaging

of non-experts in the decision and design processes. In so doing,

we proposed modular assemblies as a floating neighbourhood, designed

and tested computationally using advanced modelling techniques to address

potentials of floating systems to grow and create formations in

waterfront cities. In this paper we tested 2 possible spatial developments

of floating configurations in order to understand non-experts’

preferences captured from an in-house developed computational model

in comparison with designer’s digital assembly strategies to deliver various

emergent complex scenarios of urban development.