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The concept of shape grammars has often been proposed to improve or support creative design processes. Shape grammar implementations have the potential to both automate parts of the design process and allow exploration of design alternatives. In many of the existing implementations, the main focus is either on capturing the rationale of a particular existing grammar or on allowing designers to develop a new grammar. However, little attention is typically given to the actual representation of the design space that can be explored in the interface of the implementation. With such representation, a shape grammar implementation could properly support designers who are still in the process of designing and may not yet have a clear shape grammar in mind. In this article, an approach and a proof-of-concept software system is proposed for a shape grammar implementation that provides a visual and interactive way to support design space exploration in a creative design process. We describe the method by which this software system can be used and focus on how designers can interact with the exploration process. In particular, we point out how the proposed approach realizes several important amplification strategies to support design space exploration

Shape grammars are rule-based formalisms for the specification of shape languages. Most of the existing shape grammars are developed on paper and have not been implemented computationally thus far. Nevertheless, the computer implementation of shape grammar is an important research question, not only to automate design analysis and generation, but also to extend the impact of shape grammars toward design practice and computer-aided design tools. In this paper, we investigate the implementation of shape grammars on a computer system, using a graph-theoretic representation. In particular, we describe and evaluate the implementation of the existing Rabo-de-Bacalhau transformation grammar. Apractical step-by-step approach is presented, together with a discussion of important findings noticed during the implementation and evaluation. The proposed approach is shown to be both feasible and valuable in several aspects: we show how the attempt to implement a grammar on a computer system leads to a deeper understanding of that grammar, and might result in the further development of the grammar; we show how the proposed approach is embedded within a commercial computer-aided design environment to make the shape grammar formalism more accessible to students and practitioners, thereby increasing the impact of grammars on design practice; and the proposed step-by-step implementation approach has shown to be feasible for the implementation of the Rabo-de-Bacalhau transformation grammar, but can also be generalized using different ontologies for the implementation

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