DESIGN BY INTERACTIVE EXPLORATION USING MEMORY-BASED TECHNIQUES

One of the characteristics of design is that designers rely extensivel y on past experience in order to create new designs. Because of this, memory-based techniques from artificial intelligence which help store, organise, retrieve, and reuse experiential knowledge held in memory a re good candidates for aiding designers. Another characteristic of des ign is the phenomenon of exploration in the early stages of design con figuration. A designer begins with an ill structured, partially define d, problem specification, and through a process of exploration gradual ly refines and modifies it as his/her understanding of the problem imp roves. The paper describes DEMEX, an interactive computer-aided design system that employs memory-based techniques to help its users explore the design problems they pose to the system, so that they can acquire a better understanding of the requirements of the problems. DEMEX has been applied in the domain of the structural design of buildings.