Cooperative Design in a Visual Interactive Environment

This paper deals with a CAD-like tool supporting the conceptual phase of a visual design process. A new design system supporting collaboration among different domain designers is proposed. The system is based on visual languages of icons, graph patterns and graph rewriting. It offers a simple graphical interface, where various sets of icons representing design structural components can be specified by different designers. Graph nodes labelled by icons are arranged by users to create graphs representing spatial and structural relationships between components of design drawings. The system provides schemes of rules, which are most often applied to develop graphs. Cooperating designers can extend existing or add new rule schemes in order to modify graphs being generated according to their needs. Moreover, the system supports attributed graphs which allow for propagating semantic information and capturing parametric modeling knowledge. The approach is illustrated on examples of designing bridges, gardens and different forms of buildings.