Creativity, art practice, and knowledge
Communications of the ACM
A typology of design space explorers
Artificial Intelligence for Engineering Design, Analysis and Manufacturing - Special Issue: Design Spaces: The Explicit Representation of Spaces of Alternatives
Advanced Engineering Informatics
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Design involves reasoning about descriptions of design artifacts, reasoning about design requirements, and reasoning about design process objectives (such as keeping to deadlines and available budget). Reasoning about these three aspects occurs during exploration, generation, and evaluation of partial design descriptions. Design space exploration involves exploration in all three related spaces: the space of partial descriptions of design artifacts, the space of design requirements, and the space of design process objectives. These spaces are vast. 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. In their Keynote Article, Woodbury and Burrow describe one of these spaces, namely, the space of design object descriptions, as a network of partial and intentional descriptions of design artifacts. The links between partial descriptions represent paths in design processes. Making the information compiled in these paths of exploration explicit, as proposed in this paper, extends the approach described by Woodbury and Burrow, increasing options for accessibility.