Multiple Criteria Decision Making Approach to Interior Design

Xu Wenjiang

Abstract

Interior design is the art and science of enhancing the interiors, it requires engineering and technical knowledge, but also need the art of theory and skills, refers to the interior to establish any related objects. To meet certain construction purposes (including the use of its functional requirements, the visual experience of its requirements) and the preparatory work for the existing building space for deep processing of value-added preparation work. The purpose is to allow specific materials in the technical, economic and other aspects, in the feasibility of the formation of limited conditions can become qualified products in the preparatory work. Nowadays more and more people are pursuing living environment quality, thus increasing the demand for interior design. But sometimes people can’t explain well what they want, and meanwhile interior designer can’t get the clients’ demands well, which results in extended duration of interior design. However, there is a lack of comprehensiveness in the existing approaches as well as the tendency to neglect the relevance of objective values during decision making. So we need to solve this problem to make the interior design more efficiently. This thesis proposes an interior design – based multiple criteria decision making approach. First of all, this approach assessed the customers’ demands via a model created with interior design knowledge database to release several alternatives. The second part of the approach is to assess the alternatives by the traditional Analytic Hierarchy Process based on multiple criteria decision making to obtain the options. In this thesis, the approach of AHP involved six steps: Get user input, Retrieve top design concept from database, Evaluate the design use AHP, Produce modify design, re-evaluate proposed design with previous design to confirm and finalize the result. This proposed integrated model aims to come up with a framework to identify metrics for evaluating the performance of Interior Design. Results supplied by this model come in the form of an index for benchmarking. Potential improvement areas can also be distinguished to enhance performance of the design.