Thailand. Its lower section (“tin chok”) is a woven fabric comprising frieze patterns. Harmonised Shape Grammar (HSG) can assist in the design process to achieve harmonized and meaningful designs. We developed the generic framework of HSG to suit a specific context, so that the pattern sets in “tin chok” can be regenerated. We applied this framework to six pattern sets decoded from vintage skirts. This framework consists of five levels of analysis (identifying shape elements, identifying fundamental units, identifying/ understanding a set of rules, generating frieze patterns, arranging frieze patterns on the design structure). We find that their shape elements can be classified into trilateral shapes and quadrilateral shapes. There are 24 fundamental units confined to rectangular spaces. “Tin chok” is designed to have four parts: a main part, two supplementary parts and a hem. By applying the rules of seven frieze groups, a fundamental unit for each part can be generated to seven design derivations. There are 28 possibilities for design derivations per set. However, only 12 possibilities for design derivations appear. Among these, only three out of seven frieze groups are employed.

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Currently shape grammars are designed for static models and applied in limited domains. They demand extensive user skills and cannot guarantee aesthetic results. Although the current approaches to shape grammar produce infinite designs the final designs lack context and harmony. The aim of this paper is to address the contextual and harmonisation issues in shape grammar by proposing a shape grammar framework inspired by the field of natural language processing. The new shape grammar framework make use of the four levels of analysis namely lexical, syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic levels, to enhance the overall design process. In satisfying these semantically and pragmatically well-formed constraints, the generated shapes can be contextual and harmonious.

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