Home | Project Description | People | Publications | Links | Events | Contact
Research questions   |   Research context   |   Research methods   |   References   |   Examples of shape computations
	Research Methods How do designers, across a range of disciplines, generate shapes? This question will be posed in three discipline settings: art & industrial design, architecture and consumer product design. Design case studies, involving both professional and student designers, will be established in each discipline. For example, in product design, case studies will be drawn from undergraduate product design work that is mentored by experienced product designers. One case that will be delivered in 2006/07 will focus on the design of a martini glass using the brief from the 2006 Bombay Sapphire Designer Glass Competition. It can be seen that the designs in the competition all have styling that makes them identifiable as martini glasses (and which could be captured in a set of shape grammar rules) but each design also has its own individual characteristics. This aligns well with early work by Prats et al on the synthesis of wine glass shapes [Prats et al 2004]. In contrast, the art and design cases will be drawn from practitioners across a spectrum including sculpture, fashion and graphics. The architectural cases will study practitioners working on spatial aspects of complex projects. The researchers will collect data from the designers that illustrates how shapes are generated and/or the results of shape generation activities. Precisely what data will be collected depends upon what is available and may well be discipline specific. Through analysis of this primary data, and interviews with the designers themselves, we will draw out answers to the question we are posing.
	What similarities and differences in approach can be observed? A short series of workshops will be held where the findings from the design cases in each discipline will be compared. The team has some experience in such comparisons through work that is scheduled for publication in early 2007 [Eckert et al 2007]. The workshops will include both researchers and designers who participated in the discipline based investigations. The goals of the workshops will be to compare and contrast findings on how designers in different domains generate shapes. We anticipate that the research on shape recognition mechanisms will provide tools to support these workshops.
	Can computer vision techniques be used to resolve the sub-shape detection problem? The feasibility of using computer vision technology in sub-shape detection will be explored. Early discussions have concluded that the approach is feasible but a number of possible problem areas need to be investigated. As a result, software-based experimentation will be used to address the following questions. Computer vision recognition systems detect visual objects. In this research shape presentations will be used as the visual objects. To what extent will the granularity of the shape presentation influence the precision with which sub-shapes can be detected? Shape representations are the computational construct to which rules are applied. Shape presentations are derived from shape representations. What relationships will be needed between a visual object and its shape representation to enable the application of shape rules? As shapes are detected and rules applied, the underlying shape representation is likely to become fragmented. If so, how can this problem be overcome? This is the riskiest part of the project but, if successful, will have a groundbreaking significance in the shape grammar and design systems research communities. Our goal is to produce, in experimental prototype form, a software tool that includes the Leeds shape grammar system and a so-called “design shape recognizer” that is built upon visual recognition technology.
	How might the ability to compute shapes enhance the act of designing itself? For at least one design case per discipline, shape grammar rules will be extracted and codified in a form suitable for use by the experimental software prototype. (If the experimental prototype is not realised then we intend to use a combination of the existing Leeds software and paper-based studies.) These rules will then be used to compute a network of design shapes which will be compared with the source design case data. This will be an iterative process involving a shape grammar specialist, a representative of the design discipline concerned and, where possible, the designers who generated the source data. We anticipate that participation in this process by designers will facilitate reflective practice and make them aware of the regions of the design solution space to which their initial design activity related.
Research questions   |   Research context   |   Research methods   |   References   |   Examples of shape computations

Department of Architecture University of Strathclyde Glasgow UK	Faculty of Engineering University of Leeds Leeds UK	Department of Design and Innovation The Open University Milton Keynes UK