Performance-based design approaches typically use iterative simulation as a way of exploring design variants. For such approaches, the speed of execution of the simulations is critical to enabling fluid and interactive design process. This research proposes an iterative simulation design method where simulations are configured to run in two modes: in fast mode, simulations produce less accurate results but due to their speed can be applied successfully within an iterative refinement process; in slow mode, the simulations produce more accurate results that can be used to verify the performance improvements achieved using the iterative refinement process. A case study is presented where the proposed method is used to explore performance improvements related to levels of incident illuminance and incident irradiance on windows.

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