USING A MULTIPLE CONCURRENT DESIGN VIEWS INTERFACE TO ENHANCE DESIGN COMPLEXITY MANAGEMENT

Modern product design complexity is a problem faced by designers of complex geometric products. It is very difficult for a designer to assimilate the vast amounts of data necessary to produce and understand such complex designs in their totality. Recently, research has been done to better manage design complexity, but little or no work has been done with respect to user interfaces for complexity management tools. In this research, we present a concurrent design views interface to enhance design complexity management. This user interface assists the designer in creation and visualization of complex design frameworks. These design views support different levels of design detail and complexity, and also provide hierarchical design decomposition of complex design frameworks. Concurrency between design views is maintained, thus increasing the overall power of the system. To demonstrate the validity and applicability of this approach in solving complexity management issues, a prototype system implementation of an intuitive user interface built upon an existing complexity management framework is presented.