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    We are faculty and graduate students in the School of Interactive Arts and Technology at Simon Fraser University. We come from many disciplines, many countries and many cultures. What we have in common is intense interest in design and how it is being transformed by computation. We seek to create ideas, interfaces, algorithms and systems to lead change.

    Design work is now done with digital media. This has profound effects on the work itself and the designs produced. Digital data are shared among professionals and are a means for public engagement in design. Firms employing new digital tools can gain real advantage in national and international markets.

    The Computational Design research group aims at new ideas, models, representations and systems for design in the complex contemporary world.

    Ideas

    Computational Design seeks to understand design and to use computers to do so. Our vision is to create compelling computing aids that complement the capabilities of designers in general and flexible ways.

    We do both basic and applied research. There is much yet to be understood about design and computer models that might support it. However, such models fail a test of falsifiability if they remain unimplemented. In addition, questions of the appropriate human-computer interfaces cannot be addressed in the abstract—progress here relies on well-founded implementations. We see our research mission as building basic theory, and constructing, testing, using and disseminating representations, algorithms and implementations, both to develop and test theory and as tool prototypes in their own right.

    What is especially unusual about our work is its implementation emphasis. It is clear to us that high-quality, tested, prototype implementations of design generation mechanisms are essential to future theoretical progress in the field and to its application outside of academia. Knowledge remains the product of our work, but implementations and their use are necessary prerequisites.

    Achieving these aims requires a multi-disciplinary basis. In understanding design we proceeded from the work of others, for example, Prof. H. Simon (late of Carnegie Mellon) and Prof. A. Newell (late of Carnegie Mellon), who set out models of human thought that describe higher level cognition in information processing terms. Such models are a ready structure onto which computational extensions can be grafted. In recent years, We use ethnographic methods to understand human thought and action at larger time scales and with greater ecological validity than typically achieved with information processing models. We have been influenced by those, for example, Prof. R. Coyne (Edinburgh), who claim that design is a phenomenon only partially apprehended by any single model. In understanding how computing applies to design, we proceed partly from formal models of design generation and representation developed by, for example, Prof. U. Flemming (Carnegie Mellon), Prof. R. Krishnamurti (Carnegie Mellon), Prof. William Mitchell (MIT), and Prof. G.Stiny (MIT). These models posit a space of designs that can be traced out by operators that generate designs from other designs. To use such models requires the representation of designs, especially their geometry. Thus the large field of geometric and solids modelling are important sources for us.