AIDE 2015

Design is a fundamental activity in disciplines like engineering and architecture as well as in emerging areas of the social and life sciences.

The need for design rests on an assumption: We can improve (positively or negatively) our products, environment, personal or social life by consciously modifying different things like objects, processes, relationships. Modern design approaches, i.e., the methodological planning of what to change and how in order to obtain a certain result turned out to be successful and, as a consequence, the world that we inhabit is increasingly a designed rather than a natural one. In this sense, we could even say that we live an "artificial" world. Design is a fundamental step preceding most of our manipulation activities like manufacturing, production, construction and implementation. Design research aims to develop an understanding of designing both as a theory and as an activity, and to produce models that can be used to aid design and to improve its efficacy.

Design research can be carried out in a variety of ways. For instance, it can be viewed largely as an empirical endeavor in which experiments are designed and performed in order to test some hypothesis about some phenomenon or behavior. This is the approach adopted in cognitive science. The results of such research can form the basis of a computational model. In a second view, design research is carried out by positing principles (perhaps in terms of formal axioms) and then deriving consequences from them. If the axioms can be mapped onto design situations then the consequences will also characterize those situations. This is the approach adopted in mathematics and logic. A third view, and the most common one in the computational domain, is that design research can be carried out by conjecturing design processes, constructing computational models of those processes and then examining the behaviors of the resulting computational systems. These are just three important approaches for design research and, it is well known, Artificial Intelligence (AI) extensively exploits all three of them. We believe it is time to understand better the links between design and AI, what are today's successful stories of their integration, and what one research area can further offer to the other.