Quantifying The Cognitive Difficulty of The Parametric Model

Parametric modeling brings many gains to architectural design. However, parametric modeling adds to the architect's demands, knowledge about data structure, analytical and differential geometry, among others, increasing the difficulty of understanding and working with the model. Precedents about cognition in parametrics relate to design knowledge, creativity, complexity, and flexibility of use of parametric models. There is a gap on the quantification of abstraction to analyze the models. Information was accessed on the assembly class of the Grasshopper components, classifying them into levels of abstraction, according to their typical application in architectural design. A dataset with more than 400 models from 29 training courses and workshops was analyzed. It indicated that cognitive difficulty is influenced not only by complexity, but also by the abstraction of the operations defined. The paper contributes with new metrics: procedural abstraction, and cognitive difficulty index, which can be applied to analyze algorithms in other applications.