Design involves constant decision-making. The decision process is influenced by sets of conditions or parameters; some controllable, such as the business context, and some unpredictable and uncertain, such as stakeholders’ preference. Design decisions related to user’s perceptions and emotional response to sustainable features (daylight and green space) and aesthetic value (look and feel) are generally hard to evaluate and quantify. Typically, user response is solicited following construction, in post-occupancy evaluation studies. However, decisions with long-term impacts are often irreversible after implementation; therefore, decision-makers must seriously evaluate the design proposals (alternatives) before arriving at a decision. This paper presents an experiment conducted combining an immersive virtual environment and electroencephalogram (EEG) as a promising tool to evaluate design options during the early design stage of a project. More precisely, the objective is to (a) develop a data-driven approach for design evaluation and (b) understand the correlation between the end users’ preference and emotional state. To our knowledge, this is the first time that the combination of virtual reality technology and brainwave response monitoring has been proposed to study the design validation method in architecture.
