This doctoral work aims to understand designers' search behaviour when navigating through a large... more This doctoral work aims to understand designers' search behaviour when navigating through a large number of design alternatives. The motivation for this research lies in previous studies on designers' search for design alternatives using different design media. With an increased computing capabilities and large screen displays, the opportunity to generate multiple designs has now become practical. However, due to the paucity of desired tool features, today's designers adapt ad-hoc techniques; such as opening two files side-by-side, layering designs for comparison, and saving versions manually. These techniques are rudimentary and have limited benefits and real costs when it comes to viewing multiple designs simultaneously and making sense of the overall design space. Recently some research has presented interfaces and system features for such exploration. However, before adopting any of these solutions, it is essential to understand the act of navigating and managing a large design space. The premise of our research is that, if designers can access and work directly with a large number of designs in an environment with new representations and tools as part of the design workflow, we expect new patterns and strategies to emerge and change the design process. What though are these new patterns and strategies? To answer this, I conducted a lab experiment with ten designers who were given one thousand design alternatives of an apartment building. The alternatives were produced using generative design techniques and were printed on index cards with an intention to discover how designers would engage with these designs in a controlled lab experimental setting. The results of the experiment revealed a cycle of design tasks performed repeatedly and patterns of spatial organizations to record designers' decisions. Based on the results from the experiment, I introduce high-level spatial metaphors and develop an interface prototype to support my analysis. I also present a comparison of existing CAD interfaces with respect to the proposed spatial metaphors.
International Journal of Architectural Computing, 2015
Working with multiple alternatives is a central activity in design; therefore, we expect computat... more 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.
Proceedings of the 2016 ACM Companion on Interactive Surfaces and Spaces, 2016
Computer Aided Design (CAD) tools provide little direct support for working with multiple paralle... more Computer Aided Design (CAD) tools provide little direct support for working with multiple parallel designs. This lack of version-control has lead designers to adopt ad-hoc techniques, such as opening two files side-by-side; layering designs for comparison; copy-pasting partial solutions to merge; saving versions manually, etc. These techniques for one are rudimentary, and have limited benefits for designers when it comes to common operations on multiple designs. On one hand, design literature motivates designers to explore multiple designs in parallel for better comparison and decision-making; on the other hand, existing computational support limits such activities. Furthermore, the implications for a system capable of working with multiple parallel designs have yet to be explored. In this dissertation, I aim to identify, propose and develop parallel exploration interfaces to answer how designers can work with multiple design variations in parallel? A series of experimental studies are proposed with cyclic prototype-evaluate-feedback phases. Each phase informs the prototype development for the next phase, along with a new set of research questions.
Extended Abstracts of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 2019
Generative design tools together with large screen displays provide designers an opportunity to e... more Generative design tools together with large screen displays provide designers an opportunity to explore large numbers of design alternatives. There are numerous design studies on exploring multiple simultaneous designs, but few present interface solutions and system features for such exploration. To the best of my knowledge, no study probes exploring a large design space with multiple simultaneous states. The premise of my research is that, if designers can work directly with large numbers of designs with new representations and tools as part of the design workflow, we should expect new patterns and strategies to emerge and change the design process. Such task environments may present novel actions, task sequences, methods and techniques. What are new actions and techniques that would enable working seamlessly with multiple designs? My research aims to answer this (and similar) questions; and, more specifically, to uncover how designers' augment their work through spatial struct...
Today’s generative design tools and large screen displays present opportunities for designers to ... more 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's three key principles are: view multiple alternatives at once, edit in adhoc groups and ... more CAMBRIA's three key principles are: view multiple alternatives at once, edit in adhoc groups and maintain identity of parts across alternatives. We add two basic operations: Pass variable: One variable in one alternative, copied to another maintaining its identity. Pass value: The value of a variable, passed to other instances of same variable in different alternatives. Composing these two operations produces several user-level commands: Clone: Pass all variables from one alternative to others Parallel edit: Edit one alternative; simultaneously pass variables and values to others. Other commands are possible, such as unify.
Today’s generative design tools and large screen displays present opportunities for designers to ... more 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.
Choice overload is experienced when designers use generative systems to explore a large number of... more Choice overload is experienced when designers use generative systems to explore a large number of alternatives. In an experiment, we studied the epistemic actions designers perform to reduce their cognitive load caused by possible choice overload during design exploration. The participants were asked to select alternatives among a large set of solutions in a simulated design environment. For data encoding, we adapted an epistemic action analysis method to understand which actions occurs in what phase of design. Most epistemic actions are observed during criteria applying phase. The most frequent actions were ‘clustering and grouping’ and ‘talking and gestures to guide attention’. Ultimately our goal is to answer if a system can alleviate the possible cognitive overload when working with a large number of alternatives, if so how they would look when implemented.
Computational tools mainly support authoring single-state models, which fall short in enabling de... more Computational tools mainly support authoring single-state models, which fall short in enabling designers to work with multiple solutions side-byside. This is a natural design behaviour commonly observed when designers use other media or improvise digital tools to explore alternatives. In this paper we attempt to formalize a method that aims to help designers to create multiple design alternatives derived from a base parametric model and its controllers. The goal is to change alternative designs such that each alternative can respond to changes as their internal structures allow. We present five assumptions on the tools that this can be achieved and also a parametric design pattern to be used in similar situations. Despite the complexity of the models, we can demonstrate the possibility of working with multiple solutions in architectural design.
Although generative and parametric design methods open possibilities for working with a large num... more Although generative and parametric design methods open possibilities for working with a large number of solutions, there is almost no computational support for designers to directly manage, sort, filter, and select the generated designs. In this study, we propose an approach that presents a similarity-based design exploration relying on similarity indices that aims to reduce and collapse design space into manageable scales. The similarity indices are calculated either before generating solutions by evaluating the input parameter tuples and functions that produce aspects of designs, or after by looking at the solution features. Our goal is to enable designers to identify the design space of interest by incrementally and iteratively studying the solutions in sets, creating subsets through filtering and sorting. We also demonstrate a visualization of a similarity table that presents different interaction opportunities for system design. The approach requires further integration with ex...
Communications in Computer and Information Science
The existing research on design space exploration favors the exploration of multiple parallel des... more The existing research on design space exploration favors the exploration of multiple parallel designs, however the act of exploring a design space is still to be integrated in the design of new digital media. We conducted an experiment to understand how designers navigate through large numbers of design alternatives generated from parametric models. We analyzed the data with a purpose-built visualization tool. We observed that participants changed the task environment and took design actions, frequently combining these into action combinations. Five tasks emerged from our analysis: Criteria Building, Criteria Testing, Criteria Applying, Reflection and (Re)Setting. From our analysis, we suggest several features for future systems for interacting with design alternatives.
Therefore, one important future challenge for software developers is to make optimization tools m... more Therefore, one important future challenge for software developers is to make optimization tools more accessible and more easily used by practitioners, but without compromising the rigor of use that is required to achieve valid results. The anticipated increase in adoption of optimization tools has the potential to bring substantial benefits not only to architects and building engineers but also to the users and owners of buildings, and thereby address wider economic and sustainability concerns.
Proceedings of the 2019 on Creativity and Cognition
Crowdsourcing is a powerful approach for tapping into the collective insights of diverse crowds. ... more Crowdsourcing is a powerful approach for tapping into the collective insights of diverse crowds. Thus, crowdsourcing has potential to support designers in making sense of a design space. In this hands-on workshop, we will brainstorm and conceptualise new user interfaces and crowdsourcing systems for supporting designers in the design process. The workshop consists of developmental discussions of ideas contributed by the participants. In brainstorming and design sessions in groups, the participants will ideate new crowd-powered systems and user interfaces that support the designer's divergent and convergent thinking. CCS Concepts •Information systems → Crowdsourcing; •Human-centered computing → Graphical user interfaces; Human computer interaction (HCI);
In this poster, we present two prototype systems (CAMBRIA and Dependency Graph Interface) as an e... more In this poster, we present two prototype systems (CAMBRIA and Dependency Graph Interface) as an extension to existing parametric CAD tools that enable parallel generation and editing of design alternatives. CAMBRIA is a prototype built for 2D vector drawings. It features a small but powerful set of multi-state parallel editing operations (pass object, pass property, unify, clone), while preserving object identity across states, and across operations. The Dependency Graph Interface is built on two fundamental ideas. First, use of dependency graphs enables simultaneous work on multiple design variations. These graphs capture and reveal complex data flow across alternative parametric CAD models. Second, prototype-based modeling provides a weak notion of inheritance enabling incremental description of differences between alternatives.
This doctoral work aims to understand designers' search behaviour when navigating through a large... more This doctoral work aims to understand designers' search behaviour when navigating through a large number of design alternatives. The motivation for this research lies in previous studies on designers' search for design alternatives using different design media. With an increased computing capabilities and large screen displays, the opportunity to generate multiple designs has now become practical. However, due to the paucity of desired tool features, today's designers adapt ad-hoc techniques; such as opening two files side-by-side, layering designs for comparison, and saving versions manually. These techniques are rudimentary and have limited benefits and real costs when it comes to viewing multiple designs simultaneously and making sense of the overall design space. Recently some research has presented interfaces and system features for such exploration. However, before adopting any of these solutions, it is essential to understand the act of navigating and managing a large design space. The premise of our research is that, if designers can access and work directly with a large number of designs in an environment with new representations and tools as part of the design workflow, we expect new patterns and strategies to emerge and change the design process. What though are these new patterns and strategies? To answer this, I conducted a lab experiment with ten designers who were given one thousand design alternatives of an apartment building. The alternatives were produced using generative design techniques and were printed on index cards with an intention to discover how designers would engage with these designs in a controlled lab experimental setting. The results of the experiment revealed a cycle of design tasks performed repeatedly and patterns of spatial organizations to record designers' decisions. Based on the results from the experiment, I introduce high-level spatial metaphors and develop an interface prototype to support my analysis. I also present a comparison of existing CAD interfaces with respect to the proposed spatial metaphors.
International Journal of Architectural Computing, 2015
Working with multiple alternatives is a central activity in design; therefore, we expect computat... more 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.
Proceedings of the 2016 ACM Companion on Interactive Surfaces and Spaces, 2016
Computer Aided Design (CAD) tools provide little direct support for working with multiple paralle... more Computer Aided Design (CAD) tools provide little direct support for working with multiple parallel designs. This lack of version-control has lead designers to adopt ad-hoc techniques, such as opening two files side-by-side; layering designs for comparison; copy-pasting partial solutions to merge; saving versions manually, etc. These techniques for one are rudimentary, and have limited benefits for designers when it comes to common operations on multiple designs. On one hand, design literature motivates designers to explore multiple designs in parallel for better comparison and decision-making; on the other hand, existing computational support limits such activities. Furthermore, the implications for a system capable of working with multiple parallel designs have yet to be explored. In this dissertation, I aim to identify, propose and develop parallel exploration interfaces to answer how designers can work with multiple design variations in parallel? A series of experimental studies are proposed with cyclic prototype-evaluate-feedback phases. Each phase informs the prototype development for the next phase, along with a new set of research questions.
Extended Abstracts of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 2019
Generative design tools together with large screen displays provide designers an opportunity to e... more Generative design tools together with large screen displays provide designers an opportunity to explore large numbers of design alternatives. There are numerous design studies on exploring multiple simultaneous designs, but few present interface solutions and system features for such exploration. To the best of my knowledge, no study probes exploring a large design space with multiple simultaneous states. The premise of my research is that, if designers can work directly with large numbers of designs with new representations and tools as part of the design workflow, we should expect new patterns and strategies to emerge and change the design process. Such task environments may present novel actions, task sequences, methods and techniques. What are new actions and techniques that would enable working seamlessly with multiple designs? My research aims to answer this (and similar) questions; and, more specifically, to uncover how designers' augment their work through spatial struct...
Today’s generative design tools and large screen displays present opportunities for designers to ... more 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's three key principles are: view multiple alternatives at once, edit in adhoc groups and ... more CAMBRIA's three key principles are: view multiple alternatives at once, edit in adhoc groups and maintain identity of parts across alternatives. We add two basic operations: Pass variable: One variable in one alternative, copied to another maintaining its identity. Pass value: The value of a variable, passed to other instances of same variable in different alternatives. Composing these two operations produces several user-level commands: Clone: Pass all variables from one alternative to others Parallel edit: Edit one alternative; simultaneously pass variables and values to others. Other commands are possible, such as unify.
Today’s generative design tools and large screen displays present opportunities for designers to ... more 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.
Choice overload is experienced when designers use generative systems to explore a large number of... more Choice overload is experienced when designers use generative systems to explore a large number of alternatives. In an experiment, we studied the epistemic actions designers perform to reduce their cognitive load caused by possible choice overload during design exploration. The participants were asked to select alternatives among a large set of solutions in a simulated design environment. For data encoding, we adapted an epistemic action analysis method to understand which actions occurs in what phase of design. Most epistemic actions are observed during criteria applying phase. The most frequent actions were ‘clustering and grouping’ and ‘talking and gestures to guide attention’. Ultimately our goal is to answer if a system can alleviate the possible cognitive overload when working with a large number of alternatives, if so how they would look when implemented.
Computational tools mainly support authoring single-state models, which fall short in enabling de... more Computational tools mainly support authoring single-state models, which fall short in enabling designers to work with multiple solutions side-byside. This is a natural design behaviour commonly observed when designers use other media or improvise digital tools to explore alternatives. In this paper we attempt to formalize a method that aims to help designers to create multiple design alternatives derived from a base parametric model and its controllers. The goal is to change alternative designs such that each alternative can respond to changes as their internal structures allow. We present five assumptions on the tools that this can be achieved and also a parametric design pattern to be used in similar situations. Despite the complexity of the models, we can demonstrate the possibility of working with multiple solutions in architectural design.
Although generative and parametric design methods open possibilities for working with a large num... more Although generative and parametric design methods open possibilities for working with a large number of solutions, there is almost no computational support for designers to directly manage, sort, filter, and select the generated designs. In this study, we propose an approach that presents a similarity-based design exploration relying on similarity indices that aims to reduce and collapse design space into manageable scales. The similarity indices are calculated either before generating solutions by evaluating the input parameter tuples and functions that produce aspects of designs, or after by looking at the solution features. Our goal is to enable designers to identify the design space of interest by incrementally and iteratively studying the solutions in sets, creating subsets through filtering and sorting. We also demonstrate a visualization of a similarity table that presents different interaction opportunities for system design. The approach requires further integration with ex...
Communications in Computer and Information Science
The existing research on design space exploration favors the exploration of multiple parallel des... more The existing research on design space exploration favors the exploration of multiple parallel designs, however the act of exploring a design space is still to be integrated in the design of new digital media. We conducted an experiment to understand how designers navigate through large numbers of design alternatives generated from parametric models. We analyzed the data with a purpose-built visualization tool. We observed that participants changed the task environment and took design actions, frequently combining these into action combinations. Five tasks emerged from our analysis: Criteria Building, Criteria Testing, Criteria Applying, Reflection and (Re)Setting. From our analysis, we suggest several features for future systems for interacting with design alternatives.
Therefore, one important future challenge for software developers is to make optimization tools m... more Therefore, one important future challenge for software developers is to make optimization tools more accessible and more easily used by practitioners, but without compromising the rigor of use that is required to achieve valid results. The anticipated increase in adoption of optimization tools has the potential to bring substantial benefits not only to architects and building engineers but also to the users and owners of buildings, and thereby address wider economic and sustainability concerns.
Proceedings of the 2019 on Creativity and Cognition
Crowdsourcing is a powerful approach for tapping into the collective insights of diverse crowds. ... more Crowdsourcing is a powerful approach for tapping into the collective insights of diverse crowds. Thus, crowdsourcing has potential to support designers in making sense of a design space. In this hands-on workshop, we will brainstorm and conceptualise new user interfaces and crowdsourcing systems for supporting designers in the design process. The workshop consists of developmental discussions of ideas contributed by the participants. In brainstorming and design sessions in groups, the participants will ideate new crowd-powered systems and user interfaces that support the designer's divergent and convergent thinking. CCS Concepts •Information systems → Crowdsourcing; •Human-centered computing → Graphical user interfaces; Human computer interaction (HCI);
In this poster, we present two prototype systems (CAMBRIA and Dependency Graph Interface) as an e... more In this poster, we present two prototype systems (CAMBRIA and Dependency Graph Interface) as an extension to existing parametric CAD tools that enable parallel generation and editing of design alternatives. CAMBRIA is a prototype built for 2D vector drawings. It features a small but powerful set of multi-state parallel editing operations (pass object, pass property, unify, clone), while preserving object identity across states, and across operations. The Dependency Graph Interface is built on two fundamental ideas. First, use of dependency graphs enables simultaneous work on multiple design variations. These graphs capture and reveal complex data flow across alternative parametric CAD models. Second, prototype-based modeling provides a weak notion of inheritance enabling incremental description of differences between alternatives.
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Papers by Naghmi Shireen