Elsevier

Design Studies

Volume 21, Issue 2, March 2000, Pages 205-220
Design Studies

Filter mediated design: generating coherence in collaborative design

https://doi.org/10.1016/S0142-694X(99)00042-3Get rights and content

Abstract

Architectural design involves the integration of diverse, sometimes conflicting, concepts and requirements into a coherent single composition. This paper proposes a method for negotiating architectural design across domains, by examining issues of perception, generation and evaluation, and detailing a prototype in which these mechanisms are augmented using computational agents for achieving coherence and innovation in remote collaborative design. Filter Mediated Design is intended to explore the processes and strategies of constructing intelligent designs and design intelligence.

Section snippets

The changing nature of collaborative design

In recent decades, the designer's work environment has changed. Information growth and advancements in information technology have transformed the location, structure, and flow of the knowledge one uses to design. A number of phenomena mark this transformation:

  • Specialization—humans confine the scope of their knowledge in order to go in depth on a particular subject.

  • Delegation—humans increasingly rely on other specialists, computational agents, and reference materials to augment their cognitive

An opportunity for new means of constructing coherence and innovation

This paper views the distribution of knowledge and the mediation of constraints and possibilities through digital technology as an opportunity, not to facilitate traditional means of collaboration, but to construct new means by which cohesion and innovation can be achieved in collaborative endeavors far more complex than those of the past. Fig. 1 shows a schematic diagram of traditional collaborative design compared to `filter mediated design'. In traditional collaborative design, communication

Making explicit the mechanisms of design

Collaborative Design is a Constructive Dialogic process. This means that coherence evolves through multiple cycles of concept generation and testing in `feedback loops'. The feedback allows for the generation and test processes to be reconsidered in light of the other. In an attempt to model this process, this project proposes a dialogue between three mechanisms:

  • Filters—the ability to sense attributes and construct readings in the world. `Filters' can also communicate their readings to other

As a tool for design

This work is interested in improving the communication required to generate innovation and coherence in design. When multiple participants and computational agents come together to evolve a design, the exchange of meaningful information becomes the primary concern. Generating coherence and innovation is the goal which, when left to an individual relying on verbal communication to understand the concerns of others, can be difficult. This work proposes that communication and generation of

Acknowledgements

Mitsubishi Electric Research Lab has provided their support for this project. An implementation of `filter mediated design' is being built on top of Mitsubishi Electric's `Open Community' (Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratory, http://www.meitca.com/opencom/ (1999)), a decentralized database in which every user contributes a portion of the model. Open Community provides the platform for sharing and maintaining consistency of large amounts of data over the web.

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