Halil Erhan

Programmatic Formation: Practical Applications of Parametric Design

Programmatic Formation explores design as a responsive process. The study we present engages the complexity of the surroundings using parametric and generative design methods. It illustrates that responsiveness of designs can be achieved beyond geometric explorations. The parametric models can combine and respond simultaneously to design and its programmatic factors, such as performance-sensitive design-decisions, and constraints. We demonstrate this through a series of case studies for a housing tower. The studies explore the extent to which non-spatial parameters can be incorporated into spatial parametric dependencies in design. The results apply digital design and modeling, common to the curriculum of architecture schools, to the practical realm of building design and city planning. While practitioners are often slow to include contemporary design and planning methods into their daily work, the research illustrates how the incorporation of skills and knowledge acquired as part of university education can be effectively incorporated into everyday design and planning.

Harnessing Design Space: A Similarity-Based Exploration Method for Generative Design

Working with multiple alternatives is a central activity in design; therefore, we expect computational systems to support such work. There is a need to find out the tool features supporting this central activity so that we can build new systems. To explore such features, we propose a method that aims to enable interaction with a large number of design alternatives by similarity-based exploration. Using existing data analysis and visualization techniques adopting similarity-based search, we formalized the method and its elements by focusing on systematic filtering, clustering, and choosing alternatives. We present a scenario on developing conceptual designs for a residential apartment to illustrate how the method can be applied, as well as to reveal the limitation of current tools and the potential interactive clustering and filtering features for the new systems coupled with parametric design.

Does interactive animation control improve exploratory data analysis of animated trend visualization

OBJECTIVE: Effectively analyzing trends of temporal data becomes a critical task when the amount of data is large. Motion techniques (animation) for scatterplots make it possible to represent lots of data in a single view and make it easy to identify trends and highlight changes. These techniques have recently become very popular and to an extent successful in describing data in presentations. However, compared to static methods of visualization, scatterplot animations may be hard to perceive when the motions are complex. METHODS: This paper studies the effectiveness of interactive scatterplot animation as a visualization technique for data analysis of large data. We compared interactive animations with non-interactive (passive) animations where participants had no control over the animation. Both conditions were evaluated for specific as well as general comprehension of the data. RESULTS: While interactive animation was more effective for specific information analysis, it led to many misunderstandings in the overall comprehension due to the fragmentation of the animation. In general, participants felt that interactivity gave them more confidence and found it more enjoyable and exciting for data exploration. CONCLUSION: Interactive animation of trend visualizations proved to be an effective technique for exploratory data analysis and significantly more accurate than animation alone. With these findings we aim at supporting the use of interactivity to effectively enhance data exploration in animated visualizations.

CAMBRIA: a tool for managing multiple design alternatives

Software tools assist designers in their professional work, one key aspect of which is devising, evaluating, and choosing among multiple design alternatives. Yet, with few and limited exceptions, current tools handle just a single design model at a time, forcing users to adopt various ad-hoc strategies for dealing with multiple design alternatives. In this report we describe CAMBRIA, a multi-state prototype tool for simultaneously managing multiple 2D vector graphics models. Based on expert feedback, we propose an initial set of system design guidelines for building graphics editing systems capable of managing multiple, simultaneously available design solutions. We believe that these guidelines can be successfully applied in other areas of computing as well.

Design space exploration in parametric systems: analyzing effects of goal specificity and method specificity on design solutions

In this paper, the effects of design-task specificity level on design space exploration are studied. An experiment was conducted to study the effects of goals and methods on design process and design solutions by 16 individual designers, who performed two design tasks under different combination of design goal and method specifications. Protocol analysis and outcome-based analysis were carried out. The results of the outcome-based analysis reveal that the quality of the design solutions can greatly be affected by goal specificity level of a design task, whereas in case of quantity, novelty and designers self satisfaction level, the effects are insignificant. None of these metrics showed significant influence of method specificity levels of a design task. The process-based analysis on the other hand, reveals some interesting search behaviors in parametric systems, which are then used to explain the possible reasons for insignificance in quantitative data.

ViSA: A Parametric Design Modeling Method to Enhance Visual Sensitivity Control and Analysis

The ability of parametric computer-aided design systems to generate models rapidly enables designers to explore the downstream impacts of changes to key design parameters. However, the typical modeling functions provided in the parametric systems can become insufficient when such exploration is needed for increasingly complex parametric design models. Main challenges for exploration that we observed are control and analysis of changes on the design model and in particular, when they are introduced continuously. The system interfaces and the human-visual perception system alleviate these challenges. In this study, we demonstrate ViSA, a Visual Sensitivity Analysis method that aims to make the effects of change within a parametric model controllable, measurable and apparent for designers. The approach aims to improve visually analyzing the sensitivity of a design model to planned parametric changes. The method proposes customizable control and visualization features in the model that are decoupled from each other at the design level, while providing interfaces between them through parametric associations. We present findings from our case studies in addition to the results of a user study demonstrating the applicability and limitations of the proposed method.

Making Sense of Design Space

Today’s generative design tools and large screen displays present opportunities for designers to explore large number of design alternatives. Besides numerous studies in design, the act of exploring design space is yet to be integrated in the design of new digital media. To understand how designer’s search patterns will uncover when provided with a gallery of large numbers of design solutions, we conducted a lab experiment with nine designers. Particularly the study explored how designers used spatial structuring of their work environment to make informed design decisions. The results of the study present intuitions for development of next generation front-end gallery interfaces for managing a large set of design variations while enabling simultaneous editing of design parameters.

CAMBRIA: Interacting with Multiple CAD Alternatives

Computer-aided design (CAD) tools aim to assist designers in their professional work, one key aspect of which is devising, evaluating, and choosing among multiple design alternatives. Yet, with few and limited exceptions, current tools handle just a single design model at a time, forcing users to adopt various ad hoc tactics for handling multiple design alternatives. Despite considerable prior work, there are no general, effective strategies for supporting design alternatives. New tools are needed to develop such strategies: to learn how designers’ behavior changes with support for multiple alternatives. In this article, we describe CAMBRIA, a multi-state prototype tool we developed for working with multiple 2D parametric CAD models in parallel. We describe the outcomes of an analytical evaluation of CAMBRIA using the Cognitive Dimensions framework.

WebSight: the use of the grid-based interface to convey layout of web-pages in a non-visual environment

Accessing Web content including lay out of web pages is currently limited for sight-impaired people. In general, Internet content is designed with sighted users in mind, requiring users without this ability to adapt (Edwards, 1994). The non-visual interaction methods presented by Screen Readers are often serial in nature and laborious. In this paper we introduce the design and evaluation of WebSight, a talking browser that conveys layouts of Web pages for the blind. WebSight is a plug-in for Internet Explorer and employs a universal 3X3 grid-based interface (Kamel, 2002), to assist blind people with visualizing Web content with respect to its absolute and relative positions. Each cell of the grid contains a 3X3 virtual sub-grid with nine unique positions. We conducted an experiment involving six blind and six sighted navigating a layout of a particular webpage. The study reveals that the use of absolute and relative position coupled with a grid-based interface enable blind users to build mental model of page layout at least as well as sighted users. In addition, findings of the study suggest that the grid-based interface is a universal mechanism that enhances the process of building mental models of layout designs.