The COSMOS Building Design Tool

This paper describes the development of a method to bring expert knowledge forward in the preliminary stage of the design process. We are focusing on the use ofa graphic interface which makes it possible, in an easy and for a designer, familiar way, to state explicitly about the technical and economical impact of his design proposals. The first problem to overcome was to provide the designer with a design tool that combines the capability to reflect the geometry of the design and at the same time generate systematically, for computing and evaluation, a usable database. To fulfil this task we developed the program COSMOS, it receives the basic geometry of a design and produces a set of data which can be partly evaluated inside the program and furthermore function for design and computation in specialized program. In this paper COSMOS is presented as the design tool developed so far and which we are now are introducing and testing in the education ofbuilding design and building physics at our faculty.