Whither design space?

Abstract

Design space exploration is a long-standing focus in computational design research. Its three main threads are accounts of designer action, development of strategies for amplification of designer action in exploration, and discovery of computational structures to support exploration. Chief among such structures is the design space, which is the network structure of related designs that are visited in an exploration process. There is relatively little research on design spaces to date. This paper sketches a partial account of the structure of both design spaces and research to develop them. It focuses largely on the implications of designers acting as explorers.

Performance Comparison of Basic Idea Sketches for Product Development between Manual Sketching and Computer Aided Design

“…ComputerAided Design is a tool that has been proven to have high-performance for designing support such as analysis or production. Also, it can be useful for designing choice or it can be used as the design guidelines for the new design (Woodbury, 2006).…”

“…ComputerAided Design is a tool that has been proven to have high-performance for designing support such as analysis or production. Also, it can be useful for designing choice or it can be used as the design guidelines for the new design (Woodbury, 2006).From the comparison of concept transferring procedures of basic idea between handmade design and computer modelling, it shows that these two processes have the different beginning process and they require different tools. However, both of these two designing processes support the creativity in product design since they both require the thinking process which works on making the coordination between the brain, eyes and hands.…”

Design space exploration revisited

“…The space of descriptions of design artefacts and the links between them as proposed by Woodbury and Burrow (2005) should be extended to include this essential information. This paper claims (as does Brazier et al, 1997) that design space exploration is a process that traverses three subspaces simultaneously: exploration of given and self-imposed design requirements, explorations of descriptions of design artefacts and exploration of the implications of design process objectives.…”

“…This additional information is needed to understand the reasons for the links between the different partial and intentional design descriptions. Woodbury and Burrow (2005) state that possible structures for design space are conditioned by models of exploration behaviour by designers, by choices of strategies for amplifying design action, and by the limits imposed by both computation itself and our knowledge of it.…”

“…Explicit representation of the relations between elements in these three spaces provides the additional information needed to understand and reuse descriptions of partial design process traces, and to guide design exploration. Woodbury and Burrow (2005) describe one of these spaces, namely the space of design object descriptions, as a network of partial and intentional descriptions of design artefacts. The links between partial descriptions represent paths in design processes.…”