A Short Summary of My Current Research Program

“And the pain and cost of acquiring the new tools must be far less than the pain and cost of trying to master difficult problems with inadequate tools." (Simon and Newell, 1971)

In the field of computational design, my research program investigates design as a cognitive and collaborative problem-solving process, and aims to improve design by augmenting the capabilities of designers with effective and engaging computational tools for creating built-environments, interactive objects and systems. Today, computational design tools go beyond computer-aided design (CAD) in determining the process and the quality of the design. Therefore, my research goal is to extend design tools with new knowledge, ideas, models, representations, and novel computational systems to further enhance the design and the designers’ creative capabilities. Understanding design and developing tools for design are highly coupled.

Building on our previous research, over the last four years my group and I have developed a very active research program on design space exploration by working with alternatives in parallel when using parametric design systems. Designers explore alternative solutions that are said to exist in a design space. They display distinct patterns of exploration, chief of which are parallel development, history revision, and solution fusion. Current tools work on largely single-state design models without much support on 'alternatives'. Therefore, a computational design approach focusing on these three activities together is needed. By learning from the literature and through experimentation, we are working on developing new interaction and interface solutions on realistic prototypes for design exploration. For example, we developed graph-based modeling techniques in CAD; subjunctive graphs for working with multiple alternatives; rich and interactive action history records; and an approach that generates large number of alternatives and proposes interactions for working with them in parallel in collections. My future research agenda focus on understanding if and how design acts differ when working with new design tools focusing on large number of alternatives in parallel, and how we can enable designers to expand the design space significantly using such tools for more efficient process and better designs. The outcome of our research is predicted to apply in other areas, such as games, engineering, product design, and system design.

Certainly building a solid research program is not possible without collaboration. I feel lucky to work closely with world-class researchers not only in my domain but also in others. In parallel to my main research, I collaborate with researchers where I find opportunities to learn from and contribute to solving problems in other areas. Some of these research aim to help visually impaired people to navigate the Web; to develop Visual Analytics interfaces; to enable VR users to explore different spatial and temporal configurations of immersive spaces; to increase effectiveness of social-collaboration. All these research intersects with my background and interest in cognition and human-centered system design. As an academician, my teaching is also informed from the outcome of my and others’ research, particularly for developing and applying interactive computational tools in solving real-world problems in the creative domains.

Funded Research

Interfaces for Exploring Design Solutions Through Multiple and Parallel Alternatives in Parametric CAD

NSERC Bridging Grant, Simon Fraser University, Spring 2013 (CAD 15,000)

Aims to enhance design by understanding the design process and offering computational solutions to support design space exploration. Designers explore alternative solutions (or simply, alternatives). They display distinct patterns of exploration, chief of which are parallel development, history revision, and solution fusion. I propose a computational design solution to enable these three patterns and workflow among them. This proposal seeks funding to support further development and evaluation of CAMBRIA (cf. Research Applications Developed section in this CV).

Interactive Visualization of Design Stories for Parametric Design Systems

AeroInfo Systems (A Boeing Company) and MITACS, Fall 2012 (CAD 15,000)

Focus on developing tools to enable use of interactive records of the parametric CAD (PCAD) design process as ‘design stories’. Design stories stem from a desire to go beyond a descriptive and error recovery model of history to a platform for understanding the past and extending the exploratory capabilities of parametric CAD. That is, to gain insight by visualizing the design patterns, strategies and individual actions that come before and after the designers’ accomplishments and failings across the design process and then use these as launching points for further exploration.

Interactive Systems for Visualization-Driven [Design] Decision-Making – PI

Boeing Visual Analytics Center and MITACS, Fall 2010 (CAD 20,000)

Aims to utilize decision-making theories emphasizing visual cognition in order to describe the general pattern of design-task performance by individuals and groups. The research adapts or develops visual representations and interactions that are suitable for accessing to, presenting, interacting with, and editing different types of complex design content; and to conform the relevancy to practice, for example in architectural design. The developed prototypes of computational decision-support tools will adapt the models extended and the visual analytics techniques developed. The outcome is expected to provide a theoretical ground for extending existing models that exploit human-visual system for rapid insight informing design actions. The tools will be used to verify the models and techniques; therefore a corollary to this objective is to conduct experiments involving designers (or design stakeholders) working on the prototype software, which can be implemented as part of or complementary to the tools in use–such as parametric systems.

Enabling Technologies for CAD Systems – Collaborating Investigator

GRAND NCE, Project Lead: Dr. Wolfgang Stuerzlinger, 2011-2014 (CAD 18,000 per year)

Project conducted by different researchers from different institutions in Canada. It focuses on systems for [design] histories and alternatives, enabling the known problem solving strategy of problem space exploration. We plan to research systems that enable the user to browse and manipulate significant steps of a designs history, revisiting and evaluating earlier design decisions. We will thus develop powerful mechanisms for design re-use, and communication of the design to stakeholders, and documenting the design process. Another focus is on simpler user interfaces for modeling. Constraints and simulation establish a new design space, in which histories and alternative enhance the ability to explore new alternatives for new designs. The third enables rapid, interactive exploration of the design space, which is essential to match all desired outcomes.

Parametric Design Research and Application – Researcher (Prof. Rob Woodbury as PI)

Bentley Systems Inc., NSERC CRD and MITACS AC Programs, Fall 2009 (CAD 200,000)

The research lead by Dr. Woodbury investigates parametric design and systems in the context of design. Three main focus areas are: (a) Design process visualization and communication, (b) Rule-based generation of design, and (c) Software patterns for parametric design. The research aims at improvements in several aspects of GenerativeComponents and at new knowledge of algorithms and interfaces.

Human-Centred Technologies For Sustainable Living – Collaborating Investigator

GRAND NCE, Project Lead: Dr. Rob Woodbury and Dr. Lyn Bartram, Fall 2009 (CAD 16,500)

“This project addresses several major issues in the design of information systems for technologically enabled sustainable home design: appropriate interface design for in-home technological ecosystems that support sustainability; exploring the impacts of awareness, understanding, practical action, data logging and community interaction on energy use decisions; and improving design practice, including the tools and methods used by architects, engineers, developers, and policy makers to explore design space from the perspective of occupant behaviour.” (excerpt from GRAND NCE proposal)

Use of interactive systems: Exploring Level of Satisfaction with Design — PI

Funded by Simon Fraser University, President’s Research Grant (CAD 10,000)

Proposes to investigate designer satisfaction with generated alternatives as a function of available interactive design-support tools (such as CAD systems). In specific, the studies the relationship between the designers' level of satisfaction and the alternative design solutions generated with design-support tools to learn how this satisfaction level is influenced by the time spent, the number and sequence of alternatives; and the role of visualization or graphic diagrams in producing satisfying solutions. This study extended a previous study of designer satisfaction that the PI conducted with the peers in the Design Computation program at Carnegie Mellon University.

SFU Grant: Requirements Management and Computational Design Support in Architectural Programming — PI

Funded by Simon Fraser University and SIAT (CAD 60,000)

Proposes to continue research on developing design-computation support for integrating architectural design activities including design requirements and specifications. Explores software models and interaction techniques that seamlessly combine two different but highly related phases in architectural design through digital objects and interaction between these objects.

Learning from Masters: Academic Apprenticeship Model for Computational Design Courses — PI

Funded by UAE University Research Affairs. 2005. (AED 12,000)

Studied “design studios” and “active and collaborative learning” in science and engineering design education. A proposed model based on ‘social-constructivist paradigm’ is presented for the courses covering problem solving through computation. In this model, the “design studio” method is used for structuring the physical classroom environment and defining an interaction model between students and instructors as well as between students. The model is named “Academic Apprenticeship Model” and fundamentally is a reinterpretation of ‘apprenticeship’ in an educational environment.

A Usability Study on RaBBiT: Effectiveness in Requirements Knowledge Modeling and Generation for Complex Design Domains — PI

Funded by UAE University Research Affairs. 2004 (AED 9,500)

RaBBiT is a tool for design requirements modeling and generation that I developed as part of my PhD studies. Before the first release of RaBBiT, its effectiveness and efficiency from the perspective of human-computer interaction should be verified. This research proposal focuses particularly on this verification through (a) measuring the usefulness of RaBBiT and its effectiveness in requirements modeling and generation, (b) assessing the usability of RaBBiT applying heuristic evaluation methods for user-interfaces. These two focus areas are highly-coupled; usefulness depends on high-usability and usability can't be achieved without a goal at hand. The other focus area will be restructuring the software design and implementation for making RaBBiT available to open-source software development community. This presents opportunities for making RaBBiT a better tool and available to different interest groups.

The interaction of cognitive and social dimensions in the understanding of computer programming and programming languages.

Funded by UAE University Research Affairs, Peter Warren, Co-PI. 2004 (AED 12,000)

Teaching and learning programming languages is a social activity influenced by cultural norms. Therefore, considering only functional approaches to teaching programming are not sufficient; the socio-cultural aspects are equally important and need special attention. We questioned how groups of people come to learn; to what extent languages support the way people think and interact with one another; and how these change the way programming languages are thought of and constructed. This research project builds on previous work of the investigators looking at HCI research and minimalist principles, which supports the understanding of the process of programming and learning to program. Focusing on the social and cultural aspects will be particularly interesting in a country with different norms from the West where much of this research has been done.

Parallel RTL Simulation Engine

Funded by UAE University Research Affairs, with A. Elchouemi, PI. 2004, (AED 14,000)

We intend to investigate the optimization techniques for parallel Resistor Transistor Logic simulation engines. A novel net-list partitioning technique is proposed incorporating different optimization models for task assignments. Our main objective is to develop an interactive prototype system for parallel RTL simulation that will employ the new partitioning technique for microprocessor design.