Rethinking How ‘Design Spaces’ Are Constructed, Represented and Explored

Saturday 6 July 2024, 2:00 pm to 5:30 pm

Workshop Chairs

Esdras Paravizo (University of Cambridge) | ep650@cam.ac.uk

Ada Hurst (University of Waterloo) | adahurst@uwaterloo.ca 

John Gero (UNC Charlotte) | john@johngero.com 

Workshop Committee

Nathan Crilly (University of Cambridge) | nc266@cam.ac.uk 

Alison Olechowski (University of Toronto) | olechowski@mie.utoronto.ca 

Hadas Sopher (Ariel University) | sopherh@ariel.ac.il 

Julie Milovanovic (UNC Charlotte, Truist) | jmilovan@uncc.edu 

Background

Much of design research is framed around the concept of “spaces”: problems, solutions, alternatives, concepts, knowledge and even design itself have all been described as spaces. The design research community has invested significant effort into visualising these spaces, understanding their configuration and investigating how designers explore and expand them. For example, a collection of design space representations is provided below, but what do they actually represent, how are they created, who uses them and what can we do with them in the future?

Current research efforts have been moving towards novel approaches to construct the various spaces relevant to design, from natural language processing (Gero and Milovanovic, 2023) to reinforcement learning agents (Agrawal and McComb, 2023). Different perspectives on the use of spaces have also emerged, ranging from design space exploration (Mohiuddin and Woodbury, 2022) and expansion (Perisic, Štorga and Gero, 2021), to using design space for trade-off evaluation (Nickel, Duimering and Hurst, 2022) and design creativity (Ahmed et al. 2019, Paravizo and Crilly, 2024). 

Given the multitude of interests, applications and approaches available, this proposed workshop aims to provide a forum for the discussion of the underlying premises, challenges and opportunities on the use of spaces in design research and implications for design education and practice.  

Figure: Some representations of design spaces currently employed in design research.

Goals of the workshop

The goals of the workshop are to: (1) discuss what design spaces are and how they are used in design research, (2) explore alternative approaches to the creation of design spaces and (3) reflect on the application of design spaces as a tool in educational and professional settings. These goals drive the three main topics that will be explored in the workshop:

• What is a design space?

o How does it relate to other spaces (e.g., problem, solution, concept, knowledge, etc.)

o How can design spaces incorporate the temporal dimension of design?

• How can the design space be represented?

o What are existing approaches to creating design space representations?

o How can NLP, ML and AI support the creation of design spaces?

• How can design space representations be used? 

o How can design spaces be employed in design education and practice (e.g., creative feedback, CAD activities)?

o How can design spaces represent individual contribution and collaboration in team design activities?

o What are the future directions of design space use in design research?

Participation

The workshop is open to all researchers, practitioners and educators who are interested in or curious about design spaces. Workshop participants will share and gain insights on the state of the art in design space creation. They will contribute to defining and refining a common understanding of design spaces, helping to strengthen the connection between researchers exploring this topic.

Participants who want to share their previous experience with design spaces as a lightning talk (3 minutes – 3 slides) can arrange this in advance by contacting Esdras Paravizo (ep650@cam.ac.uk).

Before the workshop, participants are encouraged to explore a collaborative Miro board showcasing different design space representations reported in the literature. Although not required, participants are welcome to share their own examples of design space representations, criticisms of design space concepts and questions about visualization on the board before the workshop.

All artifacts generated during the workshop (including Miro board content, texts and diagrams) collaboratively produced in physical and virtual formats will be collated and made publicly available as a report in an institutional repository. All workshop participants’ names will be listed as authors of this report, unless otherwise requested by the participant (opt-out option available).  

Workshop format

The workshop will comprise a combination of small group and whole group activities and discussions, as follows:

• Welcome and brief introductions from all workshop attendees (20 minutes).

• Lightning talks – existing design space visualisations (30 minutes).

• Small group activity – building an initial design space (25 minutes).

• Collective discussion – different perspectives and expectations when building design spaces (25 minutes).

• Break  (20 minutes).

• Small group activity – rethinking design space role in research (25 minutes).

• Collective discussion – the future of design spaces (35 minutes).

• Summarizing workshop findings, next steps and closing (25 minutes).

References

Agrawal A, McComb C (2023) Reinforcement Learning for Efficient Design Space Exploration With Variable Fidelity Analysis Models. Journal of Computing and Information Science in Engineering 23:041004. https://doi.org/10.1115/1.4056297

Ahmed F, Ramachandran SK, Fuge M, et al (2019) Interpreting Idea Maps: Pairwise Comparisons Reveal What Makes Ideas Novel. Journal of Mechanical Design 141:021102. https://doi.org/10.1115/1.4041856

Gero J, Milovanovic J (2023) The Situatedness of Design Concepts: Empirical Evidence from Design Teams in Engineering. Proceedings of the Design Society 3:3503–3512. https://doi.org/10.1017/pds.2023.351

Mohiuddin A, Woodbury R (2022) Interactive Visualization for Design Dialog. In: Gero JS (ed) Design Computing and Cognition’20. Springer International Publishing, Cham, pp 491–508. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-90625-2_29 

Nickel J, Duimering PR, Hurst A (2022) Manipulating the design space to resolve trade-offs: Theory and evidence. Design Studies 79:101095. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.destud.2022.101095

Paravizo E, Crilly N (2024) DS-Viz: A Method for Visualising Design Spaces. Proceedings of the Design Society, 4. https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.105967 

Perisic, MM, Štorga, M, & Gero, JS (2021) Computational study on design space expansion during teamwork. Proceedings of the Design Society, 1:691-700. https://doi.org/10.1017/pds.2021.69