Perspective-based Critiquing: Helping Designers Cope with Conflicts among Design Intentions

Analyses of design activities indicate that conflicts detected at the solution level often originate in conflicts at the design intention level. We have extended previous computational critiquing approaches by helping designers to become aware of, understand, and resolve conflicts among design intentions. A perspective-based critiquing system allows designers to explicitly represent design intentions in terms of perspectives, and critiques design solution forms according to each specified perspective. By attending to the critic messages and associated design rationale, designers become aware of the conflicts among abstract perspectives. We describe two design environments that provide such perspective-based critiquing systems: the KID (Knowing-in-Design) design environment and VDDE (Voice Dialog Design Environment). These design environments use different approaches for representing perspectives and partitioning the knowledge-base. We compare the two approaches and enumerate design guidelines for creating perspective-based critiquing systems.