Design Space Navigation as a Collaborative Aid

The Redux’ server is an agent, with no domain-specific knowledge, that provides generic coordination services to distributed design systems. The coordination is accomplished by a“wrapper” technique requiring relatively little modification of existing agents. Yet the coordination services significantly extend the usual“ask/tell” agent protocols. These advantages are obtained because the server is based on a simple and ubiquitous search-based model of design decisions. The central hypothesis is that routine design can be considered search and design agents can be coordinated by management of the search space.