One of the products of engineering, besides constructed artifacts, is design documentation. To understand how design participants use documentation, we interviewed designers and typical documentation users and also took protocols of them both creating and using design documentation. Our protocols were taken from realistic projects of preliminary design for heating, ventilation and air condition...

Parametric design is an emerging research issue in the design domain. However, our current understanding of creativity in relation to either a process or product standpoint is limited. This paper presents a formal approach for the description and identification of creativity from both perspectives. The framework combines: (i) protocol analysis for encoding cognitive design activities, providing...

Present paper presents a parametric performancebased design model for optimizing hospital design. The design model operates with geometric input parameters defining the functional requirements of the hospital and input parameters in terms of performance objectives defining the design requirements and preferences of the hospital with respect to performances. The design model takes point of depar...

The international standard STEP stands for standard for exchange of product model data. It represents ISO 10303. In the STEP, common shape representation is supported by various part groups. In this paper, four major part groups are investigated. The first part group is part 40's, the integrated generic resources, which provide the fundamental framework for shape representation. The second part...

This chapter describes the application of seven approaches to support three basic task types of design (design selection, parametric design and design synthesis). The specialization of these approaches to practical design techniques is analyzed and illustrated with examples.

Using the artifice of the i-device as an analogue, this paper examines issues in making design software more accessible through projects on computer-aided sustainable design, panelization for design and fabrication, and parametric shape grammar interpretation. In each case accessibility is improved by transitioning design from a representational concern to one that is more process oriented thro...

A methodology is presented to assist the synthesis of engineering decisions based on the representation of feasible space. Given a parametric model and initial specifications, the Extensive Simplex Method is proposed to traverse the extreme points of an approximate linear model. The connected extreme points are projected to a set of two-dimensional viewing planes to visualize the feasible space...

Previous applications of genetic programming ~GP! have been restricted to searching for algebraic approximations mapping the design parameters ~e.g., geometrical parameters! to a single design objective ~e.g., weight!. In addition, these algebraic expressions tend to be highly complex. By adding a simple extension to the GP technique, a powerful design data analysis tool is developed. This pape...