Andrew Burrow

Whither design space

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.

Negotiating access within Wiki: a system to construct and maintain a taxonomy of access rules

A wiki hypertext is typically accessible and editable by all. While this removes impediments to collaboration, it often deters participants who would rather incubate ideas before bringing them to the group. This is especially the case where creative ideas are at stake. Creating additional wikis with restricted access is a costly solution: it requires participants to distinguish between and navigate between wikis; it requires administrators to construct wikis and their access rules; and it does not account for the movement of content from private to public. In this paper, we describe a system that augments the hypertext in order to solve these problems. This system automatically creates and maintains access rules in response to browsing and editing of the wiki hypertext. In doing so, it improves the targeting of documents in the hypertext, and identifies significant collections of documents and participants.

A typology of design space explorers

The act of design is a complex of actions and abilities that is evolving and often highly individual. Given the context of human–computer interaction, and a commitment to the model of design space exploration, we identify two axes that help position efforts to realize this model: the spectrum of strengths and needs that stretches from the machine to the human, and the time scale of events in design. Considering a section of each reveals a landscape that prefers certain activities and gives rise to particular emphases. This paper places the other authors in this Special Issue upon this map, and argues the value of typed feature structures and information orderings to the endeavor of realizing design space explorers.

Notes on the Structure of Design space

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 amongst such structures is the design space – 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.

Shared Design Space

Collaborative design activity that involves remote multilateral, multidisciplinary communication has become more commonplace with the electronic means to communicate across any distance in real time. The communication itself can be both an important repository of project information and an important part of the process of conceptualisation and design development. This research has explored the apparent shortcomings inherent in commonly used means of communication and how these impact on the design process. This paper describes research that has taken as a starting point the analysis and observation of actual design communication from the archive of an internationally published collaborative project involving disciplinarily diverse and globally scattered participants. Through the analysis, we have identified characteristics of communication tools or information environments that would address the particular issues found to impede collaboration while fostering those aspects that support it. The findings have been used to inform the design, specification and implementation of collaborative information spaces based on Wiki software.

Algorithm Design Using Traversals of the Covering Relation

Where posets are used to represent taxonomies, concept lattices, or information ordered databases there is a need to engineer algorithms that search, update, and transform posets. This paper demonstrates an approach to designing such algorithms. It presents a picture of covering relation traversals that characterises these in terms of up-set and down-set expressions involving union, intersection, and difference. It then provides a detailed analysis of three types of covering relation traversal. The approach is demonstrated by describing a suite of derived algorithms. The intention is to express a manner of decomposing mathematical problems into poset traversals, and to provide context to the selection a particular traversal algorithm. This line of work has previously been pursued by [1]. However, the success and influence of Formal Concept Analysis [2] has shifted the emphasis from posets to lattices, and from algorithms that operate on the graph of the partial order to the formal context. This paper contributes a methodology for the renewed investigation of poset algorithms, with the potential to lead to improvements in algorithms such as the online completion to a lattice.