Design spaces: The explicit representation of spaces of alternatives

摘要

This Special Issue is in an exceptional format. Starting with an invited Keynote by Rob Woodbury and Andrew Burrow, the rest of the issue is taken up by invited papers that are responses to Woodbury and Burrow's paper, written by selected authorities on design. A final short section is devoted to Woodbury and Burrow's reactions to the responses. Rob Woodbury and Andrew Burrow set the stage in their paper "Whither design space?" The exploration of design spaces is a long-standing focus in computational design research. Design space exploration is the idea that computers can be used to help designers by representing many designs, organizing them in a network structure that forms the space, and by assisting designers to explore this space: that is, to make new designs and to move among previously discovered designs in the network.