Alternatives in computer-aided design and visual analytics

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

Devising and choosing alternatives is a key aspect of professional work, for which available tools provide little support. The current trend to parametric software sharpens the need for explicit representation of alternatives as these tools produce multiple outputs. This proposal aims at representation, visualization and choice of alternatives in parametric systems, applied to two domains: computer-aided building design (CAD) and visual analytics (VA). The extant interfaces for alternatives are structured by ideas such as versioning, branching, history, provenance, undo and galleries. All of these are useful at some point in design and analysis. None fulfill all design tasks. This project abstracts the representation of alternatives away from being bound to specific tasks, instead structuring alternatives by collections, visualizations, configurable creation/editing operations, and simultaneous editing.The research premises are that (1) alternatives are model states; (2) collections of alternatives are first class objects; (3) collections may be ordered by multiple relationships (creation time, edit time, input similarity, output similarity, designer choice,...); (4) multiple such collections can be simultaneously available; (5) users decide how collections are generated, visualized and interact; (6) the system provides general, reconfigurable tools and policies for generating, visualizing, selecting and interacting with collections; and (7) the system provides capabilities for simultaneous editing of multiple models. The system defaults to configurations supporting known tasks. The user can reconfigure the system to support new tasks. A very simple example is supporting error recovery through undo, in which the system policy is to add each edited state at the end of an alternative list and the interface is to a sequence of such states, which can be sequentially traversed. A more complex example is exploration, in which a user produces variations of a small collection of states, each of which is arranged so as to stay close to the state from which it is a variation.