Navigating Subsumption-based Design Spaces

Design space explorers are information-rich environments conceived for providing effective support for electronic design processes. A subsumption-based design space structures the partial designs in the environment by a relation of information specificity. It provides formal exploration operators for predictive, goal-directed movement in the underlying space of designs and an interaction model for open-ended exploration. This paper focusses on the forward moving operator based on incremental pi-resolution and discusses the topic of information removal through the erasure operator. It describes the possible usage of these operators and the entry points for mixed-initiative human-computer interaction in the SEED-Config explorer .