How to make design optimization more useful to designers

This paper presents an approach to making design optimization tools more useful to designers. Design optimization is the selection of the best design solution from alternative solutions to a given problem. Design optimization tools require that all the variables, parameters, goals and constraints be defined prior to the execution of any optimization process. This narrows the scope of design optimization, as the user has to reformulate the problem if any of these change during the designing process. The situatedness paradigm in design proposes the interactions and processes between the designer/ design tool and the environment as the basis for designing. A design system based on the situatedness paradigm can handle changing variables and constraints, and can reconfigure the solution space based on an assessment of the current conditions. This paper proposes an alternate approach to design optimization based on the situatedness paradigm, where an adaptive situated optimization framework can automate the task of problem and solution reformulation as part of the optimization process to produce better solutions. The framework is demonstrated through an example using genetic algorithms as an optimization technique. Conference theme: Digital