Design Computing and Cognition (DCC'14)

Abstract

Design is one of the most fundamental human activities that we perform. Understanding the process of design, and the development of computational tools to aid in that process, is therefore a highly significant area for research. This Special Issue on design computing and cognition focuses on research that combines artificial intelligence, cognitive science, and computational theories. It also explores topics ranging from the computational representation of shape and concept to overcoming human cognitive issues like design fixation and the recognition of wicked problems.The papers in this Special Issue comprise a selection of research drawn from the Sixth International Conference on Design Computing and Cognition (DCC'14), held at University College London on June 23-25, 2014 (Gero & Hanna, 2015. A total of 131 full papers were submitted to the conference, from which 38 were accepted after a process of peer review. Conference attendees who had presented these at the conference itself were invited to submit substantially revised and expanded versions of their work, which were then submitted to a separate process of peer review for journal publication. Out of this group, the 6 papers in this issue were selected for their quality and for their representation of important themes.The first article, by Ehud Kroll and Lauri Koskela, "Explicating Concepts in Reasoning From Function to Form by Two-Step Innovative Abductions," is perhaps the most firmly grounded in the classic domain of artificial intelligence, and discusses the important issue of how a function is transformed into a form. It presents the notion of the concept as an intermediate stage between a function, as would be specified in a design brief, and the final form that is the product. Their method makes the concept explicit symbolically, both to follow a process of design to manage or educate designers and to build a logical, computational model of design.In the second article, "A Graph-Theoretic Implementation of the Rabo-De-Bacalhau Transformation Grammar," Tiemen Strobbe, Sara Eloy, Pieter Pauwels, Ruben Verstraeten, Ronald De Meyer, and Jan Van Campenhout present a computational implementation of a shape grammar based on a graph representation. Shape grammars have always appeared to suggest a computational process, but some of their most important features, such as the detection and manipulation of emergent shapes, have most often proved to be particularly difficult to implement. The use of a graph as an intermediate representation between the designer's image and the machine's symbols is shown here to be a potential solution. In showing how an existing grammar can be effectively encoded, the authors also argue that this can increase the designer's knowledge of the grammar itself.Biological models offer constant and rich sources of ideas for designers, and much has been made of the value of the innovative qualities of biologically inspired design. The typical understanding is of analogy: a good concept found in nature can be used, or copied, in a design...