Research

Robert Woodbury

In general terms, I am interested in understanding design and in using computers to do so. Practically, I am motivated by a vision of computing aids that complement the capabilities of designers in general and flexible ways. Achieving these aims requires a multi-disciplinary basis. In understanding design I have 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, I have used ethnographic methods to understand human thought and action at larger time scales and with greater ecological validity than typically achieved with information processing models. I have also 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, I have proceeded 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 has been an important source for me. Computationally I search for substrate mechanisms that are both applicable to design and efficient, and attempt to cast design problems as closely to these mechanisms as possible. In recent years, my main models have come from computational linguistics, notably the work of Dr. Bob Carpenter (formerly of CMU, now in industry). I 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 abstractprogress here relies on well-founded implementations. I see my 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 my work is its implementation emphasis. It is clear to me, and to others in the field, 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 my work, but implementations and their use are necessary prerequisites. My work is collaborative. Its scope is too large for a single researcher. In the interests of brevity I do not detail here the collaboration in each piece of work, though I do so in the attached curriculum vitae. I must mention here the indispensable contributions of my Ph.D. students, Maha Al-Saati, Dina Bonefacic, David Botta, Andrew Burrow, Christopher Carlson, Teng-Wen Chang, Victor Chen, Dan Corbett, Sambit Datta, Mikako Harada, Jeff Heisserman, Karine Kozlova, Kewu Li, Davis Marques, Susan Pietsch, Richard Quadrel and Zhenyu Qian. I think it fair to say that without them, I would have little work to show and without me, they might not have done their work at all. Table of Contents in chronological order Patterns for Parametric Design Parametric Modeling Visualization Shape Schema Grammars Federation Modeling Design Space Exploration AVIRE A VIsual REte Generative Design 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

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Professor Robert Woodbury

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Patterns for Parametric Design

Experts use their experience of solving problems in the past to build on and create new solutions in new situations. Such experience is part of what makes them experts. Some of these reusable solutions can be expressed in what are known as design patterns. Patterns express design work at a tactical level, above simple editing and below overall conception. A pattern comprises several components, including a name, a problem description, an abstract solution and a discussion of consequences. Through ethnographic studies, we show how patterns can be used to improve learning and work with parametric modeling and discern patterns invented by designers. We argue that the need for patterns indicates the absence of appropriate support for complexity in a parametric modeling system and seek new features and interface designs that enable working at high levels of complexity. The website www.designpatterns.ca provides the parametric modeling community with well-crafted examples of reusable code. By explaining the motivation, context and details of the code, it enables people to more effectively learn parametric modeling systems and to build larger and more complex models with confidence. Further, the patterns themselves suggest new directions for the design of such systems as GenerativeComponents.

The Place Holder pattern is key to understanding how to re-use components throughout a design.

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Parametric Modeling
Conventional CAD systems focus design attention on the representation of the artifact being designed. Currently industry attention is on systems in which a designed artifact is represented parametrically, that is, the representation admits rapid change of design dimensions and structure. Parameterization increases complexity of both designer task and interface as designers must model not only the artifact being designed, but a conceptual structure that guides variation. Parameterization has both positive and negative task, outcome and perceptual consequences for designers. Positively, parameterization can enhance search for designs better adapted to context, can facilitate discovery of new forms and kinds of form-making, can reduce the time and effort required for change and reuse, and can yield better understandings of the conceptual structure of the artifact being designed. Negatively, parameterization may require additional effort, may increase complexity of local design decisions and increases the number of items to which attention must be paid in task completion. While there is a general appreciation of the concepts and advantages of parametric modeling, application to projects at the scale and complexity of buildings raises important theoretical and practical issues. In a deep sense, parametric modelling is not new: building components have been adapted to context for centuries. What is new is the parallel development of fabrication technology that enables mass customization. Building components can be adapted to their context and parametric modelling can represent both context and adapted designs. In a design market partly driven by novelty, the resulting ability to envision and construct new architectural forms rewards firms having such expertise. There are relatively few such firms, most of which have had long experience and have built substantial reputations on distinctive form and construction. But many firms and students (future practitioners) are interested. The confluence of technology and interest appears as exploration in a new design space: architecture and its supporting technologies of parametric design and fabrication are experiencing both co-development and rapid change. I contribute to scholarly knowledge of parametric modeling in several ways. In 2005, Robert Aish of Bentley Systesms and I published a paper on technical features of GenerativeComponents that brought key ideas, such as replication, into the public research domain. With graduate students, I have devised programming constructs, such as goal seeking, that show how parametric modeling can be used for advanced tasks. Using concepts from my design space exploration work, I am seeking better ways for parametric modeling to support discrete change.

A family of kinetic structures based on traditional Persian domes requires both goal seeking to generate each structure and an exploration strategy to understand relationships within the family of domes.
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Media Visualization
As large collections of digital data become commonplace, the tasks of recall, search and reuse become both critical and difficult. I have been working on mixed initiative visualization techniques that combine computational capabilities such as data mining with human visual search. A particular premise that local browsing of related items in a computed collection can be a productive strategy for recall and reuse. Many digital collections share a common structure in which a collection, the objects collected and the meaning of the collection can be separately considered. A data structure comprising exhibitions, annotations, and resources (EAR) is a general device for organizing such collections. People author EAR structures and other people value these acts of authorship in understanding a large collection. Through co-citation and bibliographic coupling, EAR structures form a general graph that is hard for people to interpret. The research hypothesis is that recognizing, analyzing, prototyping and evaluating the EAR triangle can result in both generalizable insight and new tools for information visualization and system design. We introduce NEAR, a graph visualization tool aimed at helping people understand and use EAR structures.

The NEAR interface brings people near collections that they discover through search and data mining. It shows how collections are locally structured and supports a style of browsing akin to the well-known strategy of look beside the book you found in a library stack.

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Professor Robert Woodbury

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Shape Schema Grammars

Virtually all published shape grammars are parametric shape grammars. Apparently conventional shape grammars are not very appealing in practice. In spite of this, all of the published shape grammar interpreters are conventional. Apparently parametric shape grammars are difficult to implement. Consequently researchers can (and do) devise grammars but cannot readily use those grammars to generate designs. Since, in general, little can be known of a design space (the language of a grammar) from examination of the grammar alone, grammatical design researchers are limited in the insight they can gain from their work. Yet researchers who have used a grammar interpreter in creating grammatical understandings of designed artifacts will attest to the usefulness of doing so. The grammatical research community lacks an important capability--a general purpose interpreter that acts parametrically over shape-like objects. I use the terms ``parametrically'' and ``shape-like'' advisedly, informally capturing respectively the notions of doing simultaneous computations over a set of related variations and definite objects having indefinite subparts. Other issues arise in using grammars to compute designs. First, it is typical that a body of designs can be grouped into categories on the basis that they are dimensional variations of each other. Both conventional and parametric shape grammars would require that each member of a category be computed individually. Since categories can be indenumerably infinite, so can computations over their members. It would be useful to be able to apply grammar rules to entire categories at once. Second, shapes are often used in application to represent specific geometric constructs. Notions of incompleteness in a grammatical derivation must be dealt with through addition of new parts of a shape or modification of existing parts. There is no inherent notion of partiality, yet this would seem important to the enterprise. My solution was to devise and build a shape schema grammar and its interpreter. Shape schemata are objects that capture a class of shapes by assigning variables to the structure of a shape and giving a set of constraints over the variables. Any assignment of specific values to the variables creates a (possibly reducible) shape and any such assignment that is consistent with the constraints of a schema is an instance of the schema. Parametric shape grammars create rules out of schemata. A parametric shape grammar rule captures a potential infinity of standard shape grammar rules. Applying a parametric shape grammar rule requires finding one of the represented shape grammar rules and then applying it according to the conventions of shape grammars. Shape schema grammars admit representation of rules as schemata and allow those rules to operate themselves over schemata. In operation, they map from schema to schema. My aim is to devise the mathematics, representations and algorithms of shape schema grammars. In initial work I provide definitions for schemata, shape schemata, relations including equality, maximality and subpart, rules and ultimately shape schema grammars. I show provides a correct, though intractable, algorithm for computing shape schemata using shape schema grammars.

Schema display un-shape-like properties. Shapes are black. Shape schema are orange. The shape schema s is a part-of the shape t and t is part-of s, but s and t are not equal.
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Federation Modeling: Interactions in Parametric Design

Designs are contingent upon the contexts in which they arise. When contexts change, designs must also change to regain their persuasiveness. Change is pervasive: it occurs during the initial design process and throughout the life of a designed artifact. The IFCCA competition entry by Morphosis Architects/George Yu provides an exemplary model of a design process that facilitates change and adaptability in design. Their approach renders the design as a system of interacting parts. We take their work as a motivating example for our research in parametric modeling. Following Ackoff, we hypothesize that the ability of designers to adapt to change and complexity can be increased by managing the interactions that realize the design, and in so doing, opportunities for creative exploration will be enhanced. We present our research in five parts. First, we describe the Morphosis/George Yu project and the properties that make it relevant to our research. Second, we situate our observations in the conceptual terrains of General Systems Theory and Cognitivist models of designer behavior. Third, current parametric modeling systems and research in a class of design support systems called Design Space Explorers are described. Fourth, we outline the organization, concepts, and interactions that characterize our parametric modeling system. We conclude with a summary of the current status of system development and directions for future research. Increasing change and complexity in the task environment impedes the ability of designers to explore and develop designs. We hypothesize that by focusing on the management of interactions that realize a design, rather than on the specication of the design itself, the capacity of designers to deal with change and complexity can be increased. Our exploratory research aims at a parametric modeling application that aids designers in managing the interactions of parts that realize a design. We describe the system design, report on its current state of implementation, and present an initial evaluation.

Several windows from Federation Modeler.

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Professor Robert Woodbury

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Design Space Exploration

Design Space Explorers are computer programs that help designers consider many alternatives at once and recall related work previously done in their organization. Until recently almost all computer programs with which designers worked have treated designers as if they work alone and on single representations. We know that this is far from the truthdesigners consider alternatives and work in teams. Design firms have had to make do with ad hoc processes to manage their work. The results are that good solutions to design problems are missed and that design work is slower, more expensive and more error-prone than it might be. Design space exploration is a way to address these problems. It helps designers make, test, remember and adapt designs to new situations. Design space exploration has an established mathematical theory and has seen a few commercial applications, but it remains an immature technology. This research program will improve the theory behind design space exploration, will devise better ways for designers to work with many alternative ideas and will demonstrate the new technology with practical applications. In the 1990s my group adopted and refined a representation known as typed feature structures to represent design spaces. In 2006, Andrew Burrow and I published a pair of papers on design space exploration as the centrepieces of a special issue of Artificial Intelligence in Engineering Design and Manufacturing. These aimed to establish key research issues and philosophical problems in design space exploration. In prior work, we developed design representations that admitted efficient representation and computation over an entire space of designs.

Computation paths in design space exploration and a representative typed feature structure.

The subsumption structure of a developing design.

The space of design generated by exhaustive enumeration.

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Professor Robert Woodbury

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AVIRE A VIsual REte -- an online repository for design

Photographs, drawings and CAD files have long been crucial tools for understanding and learning about design. Computers can represent photographs and drawings as images. They also support a variety of specialist representations. Students and scholars of design use these representations extensively in their work. Computers mean that the representations have become more flexiblepeople not only refer to them but also alter and transform copies of them through their work. We have developed, deployed and evaluated a series of online repositories that each support specific user communities. Collectively they have enabled us to develop a robust design and implementation process for online repositories that serve real user need. AVIRE is a generic repository for visual material related to cultural disciplines such as architecture, art and heritage. The repository design abstracts from the requirements of particular tasks to implement a set of common features based on the metaphor of a gallery. In functional terms, galleries are spaces in which several roles play together to create the larger social entity we call a gallery. Curators organize and interpret collections. Exhibitors contribute and interpret collection material. Through their commentary, Critics relate Resources and Exhibition. Viewers visit galleries to read and make their own interpretations of the content therein. Our design provides for each of these roles and implements them as actions on five fundamental types of objects: Resources, Exhibitions, People, Works and Annotations. AVIRE that supports the above four roles and five object types. Included in this design is a meta-metadata scheme that supports variation in descriptors across content types. AVIREs implementation is based on the open-source web portal system TikiWiki, providing opportunities for customization and integration with other open-source efforts. AVIRE can be found at www.avire.ca

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Generative Design
In the late 1980s and early 1990s I was concerned with representations for the automatic generation of designs. This turned out to be foundational work for the more general topic of design space exploration. In 1991, my student, Jeff Heisserman, completed his dissertation entitled Generative Geometric Design and Boundary Solid Grammars. With it, we established a theory of grammatical computation over solid objects. As part of his thesis work, Dr. Heisserman developed GENESIS, an interpreter for boundary solid grammars, which was subsequently extended and refined in the system SEED-Config. GENESIS has been demonstrated in several applications and its ideas are presently used at Boeing Aircraft. With GENESIS we developed several grammars for applications in design. The most interesting architecturally is a grammar that generates designs for Victorian (particularly Queen Anne) houses. This grammar is an extension of one previously done by my colleague, Ulrich Flemming. With it, we can rapidly and automatically generate convincing designs for houses. Another of my students, Chris Carlson, devised a theory of grammatical programming and constructed a system, Grammatica, to demonstrate the theory. Grammatica is a domain-independent language for describing design spaces. Although it was demonstrated in describing spaces of spatial structures, it applies equally well to domains of symbol strings, graphs, solids, and in general to any domain with a formalizable, many-sorted algebraic description. A third student, Mikako Harada, wrote her thesis on Discrete/Continuous Design Exploration by Direct Manipulation. She developed an implementation of grammatical interaction that combined physically based modeling with grammatical editing of designs.

A Gothic tracery generated by Carlsons Grammatica.

A Queen Anne House, a derivation sequence and a design space generated by SEEDConfig (successor to Heissermans GENESIS).

Interactive layout in Haradas discrete design space explorer. A designer pulls on the dining room, and it shifts up in the plan.

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Professor Robert Woodbury

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