Sampling: An operator to support design dialogue in interactive design galleries

Using interactive design galleries (IDG), designers can now explore, that is, generate, analyze and extend large parametric design spaces, working in parallel rather than one state at a time. One of the common ways to support exploration is using interactive operators in IDG's. Most of the interactive operators in IDG's use detailed inputs from existing alternatives to generate new ones. This results in exploration around the existing alternatives. Once alternatives have been made explicit, that is, are members of the explicit space, IDG's provide search tools to filter to subsets of interest. This thesis proposes a new interactive operation called Sampling that combines filtering the explicit space and exploring a subset of the implicit design space using devices similar to those provided for filtering alone. The key benefit of Sampling is that the exploration is not restricted to the explicit alternatives, allowing the designer to acquire an overview of the design space. Such an overview may serve as a starting point for future design work. A formative evaluation with four experts provides initial confirmation for Sampling and suggests several improvements and extensions