The influence explorer

This paper illustrates the benejits, for a wide range of design activities, of Interactive Visualization Artifacts. INTRODUCTION In an extremely wide range of design tasks, of which electronic product design is an example, the designer is concerned with the influence of the parameters whose values can be chosen upon the performances which are of direct interest to the customer. Interactive visualization allows the fluent exploration of the effect of parameters upon performances and, thereby, the acquisition of insight, a valuable commodity in any design situation. INFLUENCE PROBLEMS In any design the performances of an artifact are determined by a set of parameters (Figure 1). Requirements are placed by a customer on the performances F1, F2... .Fn (F). It is then the task of the designer to choose values of the individual parameters PI ,P2,..Pn (P) that will lead to a design that satisfies these requirements. There may easily be as many as 100 Ps and Fs of interest. Design is difficult, partly because each performance is determined by many parameters, partly because the relation between P and F is usually non-linear, and partly because the requirements may be difficult or impossible to satisfy. The greatest difficulty, however, arises because, whereas F can be directly calculated if P is known, the reverse is not true. Even if a satisfactory parameter set is found, a further complication arises. Uncertainty is always present in the manufacturing process, so that each parameter is characterised, not by a single value, but by a nominal value and a tolerance range. This tolerance range defines the extent to which a parameter may randomly differ from the nominal value. Mindful that wider tolerances are usually associated with lower cost, one of the designer’s tasks is to choose a tolerance range for each parameter so that, despite parameter variation within this range, as many massproduced copies of the artifact pass the specification as possible. The fraction that pass is called the yield. Permission to copy without fee all or part of this material is granted provided that the copies are not made or distributed for direct commercial advantage, the ACM copyright notice and the title of the publication and its date appear, and notice is given that copying is by permission of ACM. To copy otherwise, or to republish, requires a fee and/or specific permission. CHI’ Companion 95, Denver, Colorado, USA