AIEDAM
Special Issue, May 2006, Vol.20 No.2
Design Spaces:
the Explicit Representation of Spaces of Alternatives
Edited by:
Rudi Stouffs
This special issue is in a special format. It starts with an invited
paper by Professor Rob Woodbury, who is
Professor and Graduate Program Chair at the School of Interactive Arts and
Technology, Simon Fraser University, Canada.
His co-author is Andrew Burrow of the Spatial
Information Architecture Laboratory, RMIT University. Australia.
The rest of the issue is taken up by invited papers that are responses
to Woodbury and Burrow's paper, written by selected authorities on design, and a
final short section devoted to the author's reactions to the responses.
Technical description of the topic:
The exploration of design spaces is a long-standing focus in
computational design research. Design space exploration is the idea that
computers can be used to help designers by representing many designs,
arraying them in a network structure that forms the space, and by
assisting designers to explore this space: i.e., to make new designs
and to move amongst previously discovered designs in the network.
Three main areas of research into design space exploration
can be distinguished. The first area of research concerns accounts of
designer action and aims to reproduce and extend the behaviour of
designers. It is based on the premise that exploration is a good model
for designer action. The second area of research aims to develop
strategies and tools that amplify designer action in exploration. The
third area of research concerns the discovery and development of
computational structures to support exploration, including
representations of the design space itself.
This special issue specifically focuses on computational access to the
design space and the implications of having a design space
representation in reference to the premise that exploration is a good
model for designer action. Possible structures for a design space are
conditioned by models of exploration behaviour, by choices of strategies
for amplifying designer action and by the limits imposed by both
computation itself and our knowledge of it. Formalisms for design space
exploration must simultaneously accord with designer action, implement a
useful amplification strategy and be both formalisable and
computationally tractable.
What defines a good representation? Are design rules or, instead,
design operators the appropriate encoding mechanism for design moves
in the design space? What is the role of the explicit design space,
that is the part of the design space the designer has previously
visited, and what is the role of trajectories of design moves in
design exploration? These and other questions can form the basis for a
discussion that can serve as a stepping-stone for future research into
design spaces.
__________
Information about the format and style required for
AIEDAM papers can be found at www.cs.wpi.edu/~aiedam/Instructions/.
However, note that all submissions for the special issue go to the
Guest Editor, and not to the Editor in Chief.
Please note that this is not an open call for papers, and that all
contributors will be invited.
Important dates:
Paper available for responses: 15 March 2005
Responses due: 15 June 2005
Light Reviewing of responses starts: 20 June 2005
Reviews to respondents: 1 August 2005
Revised version submission deadline: 1 September 2005
Responses to responses due: 1 November 2005
Light Reviewing of Responses to responses: 6 November 2005
Assemble all articles: 15 December 2005
Final submission deadline: 1 January 2006
Guest editor:
Please direct all enquiries and submissions to the guest editor:
Rudi Stouffs
Delft University of Technology
Faculty of Architecture
Department of Building Technology
Chair for Technical Design & Informatics
Delft
The Netherlands
Email: r.stouffs @ bk.tudelft.nl
