Shaping the future through collaborative design research

The OU is involved in a collaborative Arts & Humanities Research Council (AHRC) funded research project titled ‘Design Synthesis and Shape Generation’.

Visit any design office and you are likely to see a wide range of sketches, plans and constructions.  The act of designing, in areas as diverse as sculpture, product design  and architecture, has traditionally relied on the making of drawings, scale models and prototypes in order to create, communicate and evaluate design proposals - particularly where the shape of a design is being created. But do designers have to remain tied to these time-consuming and expensive processes?  Staff in the Design Group of the Open University's Faculty of Mathematics, Technology and Technology think not.

Steve Garner comments, "We envisage a future where computer aided design systems enhance the whole act of designing products, as opposed to just the process of defining product designs.  There is a need for enhancement of computer aided creativity - particularly computer aided shape generation."  The first part of this vision was achieved in 2008 through research into how designers generate shape computation systems might augment designers’ creativity.   The team, including Michael Prats and Iestyn Jowers, generated an innovatory design shape computation system and this is downloadable from http://www.engineering.leeds.ac.uk/dssg/downloads/requestForm.php

The experimental prototype can compute shapes, given an initial shape and a set of grammar rules.  With development, such a tool could make a significant contribution to generative design.  The new work is the subject of a bid to the Leverhulm Trust and intends to use eye tracking technology to identify participant interest in emerging sketch designs. Using the previous design shape computational tool in conjunction with data from eye tracking, the system should be able to use data in points of interest to offer designers variations on their preferred images as an aid to shape creation.

Given that much current commercial design concernsthe definitions of product variations rather than innovation, knowledge from this project will also enable the automation of the process of generating product ‘families’ through shape conjecture.

For further information contact Dr Steve Garner s.w.garner@open.ac.uk