Summary

SIAT's Computational Design Group investigates ‘design’ as a situated, cognitive, and collaborative process, and aims at improving ‘design’ by augmenting the capabilities of creative designers with effective and engaging computational tools. Their goal is to help designers to generate, manage, and share diverse and vast design information in a computer-mediated context that embraces systems with novel human-computer interfaces and interaction methods mainly for creating new objects and environments. Design today mainly relies on computational systems and digital media that their value is increasingly recognized. This includes and goes beyond the bounds of computer-aided design. They determine the process and the quality of its outcome like any other natural agents take part in design. However, there is much yet to be understood about design, human aspects and potentials for enabling-technologies. On one hand, the conventional design process is forced to change to take the full advantage of the new systems; on the other, they see a rapid change in the design practice mainly driven by technology. They observe that while there is a need for supporting activities inherent to design, such as exploration and reviewing of actions, there is limited direct support for these. As how they design being transformed, their research strives for new knowledge, ideas, models, representations, and novel computational systems. They attempt to achieve this ambitious goal by conducting iterative and incremental research at three overlapping layers: (a) developing underlying theoretical computational design frameworks based on design research, cognition, collaboration, and human-centered software; (b) applying the frameworks and knowledge from these fields to developing prototype computational design systems and testing their ecological validity; and (c) learning from and positively influencing design and related creative practices in the real world.

Biography

Siat's Computational Design Group are faculty and graduate students in the School of Interactive Arts and Technology at Simon Fraser University. They come from many disciplines, many countries and many cultures.

The research group is co-lead by Prof. Woodbury and Prof. Erhan. We have currently Dr. David Botta as Postdoc researcher, and the following students in our group...

PhD STUDENTS: Karine Kozlova, Maha Al-Saati, Maryam Kashani, Maryam Maleki, Sinisa Koloric, Vinu Subashini Rajus.

MASTERS STUDENTS: Andy Huang, Diliara Nasirova, Ivy Wang, Jelena Popovic, Naghmi Shireen, Rodolfo Sanchez.

Official Website