Toward Design as Collaboration

Abstract

In design, multiple disparate goals must be addressed simultaneously. It is the thesis of this work that problems in two-dimensional layout design can be solved by col-laboration among single-goal, intelligent agents, each re-sponsible for a class of objects and responsive to explicit metrics. In this model, each agent produces conflict-free de-signs for its own class of objects, and then, when objects conflict with each other in the combined design, the agents that own those objects address the conflicts. A limitedly ra-tional implementation demonstrates its efficacy for park layout design in the two-dimensional plane. Two-dimensional Layout Design Design problems typically entail large search spaces and multiple, ill-defined goal tests (Goel and Pirolli 1989). As a result, design has been regarded as a domain (CAD/ CAM) in which computers assist people rather than work alone. This paper’s primary contributions are a model for autonomous two-dimensional layout design as collabora-