The Design Group

This group brings together research students and staff from a range of disciplines with a shared interest in support for creative design processes. The main application areas are in product design, fashion and textiles, architectural design and urban planning. Research projects are in progress using multi-media information systems, knowledge-based systems and applied intelligent techniques to support innovation and optimisation in design.

You can join our mailing list which will keep you up-to-date with events by sending an email to J.McDonnell@cs.ucl.ac.uk and asking her nicely to be added to the design-group mailing list.

Future Events

Proposed meetings:
14 March 2000 ?
and then fortnightly

Past Events

"Organic architecture", Aniko Meszaris
"FOE project", Janet McDonnell
"Knitwear design", Helen Sharp
"How people move in virtual spaces",Ruth Conroy
"Argument in the Design Process", Simone Stumpf
"Sketching Tool Demonstration", Alasdair Turner
"Letting designs talk back", Alan Penn
"Evolutionary Design - a damn good idea, and interesting, too", Dr Peter Bentley
"Virtual worlds and space syntax", Alasdair Turner
Mark Gaved, London College of Printing, "Virtual Design Spaces: Multimedia support for designers"
Peter Lloyd, Cranfield University, "Design Fixation"
Professor Arthur Miller, Dept. Science and Technology Studies, UCL, "Data Visualisation"
Takashi Hattori, "Integration of Constraints and Macro Operators"
Fred Brooks, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, "The Design of Design"
Derek Gatherer, Liverpool John Moores, "Memetics"
Professor David Andrews, "Design in Naval Architecture"
Steve McInally, Department of Mechanical Engineering, "Design of High-Tech Equipment"
Surayya Khan, "Intelligent Systems Applied to the Fashion and Textile Industry"
Tom Quick, "Interpretivism and Language Games"
Sophie Phillips, "Repertory Grids"
Auto-Repertory-Grid Session
Anne Adams, "Grounded Theory"
Ismail Ismail, "Intergrated Development of Information Systems"
Andrew Fentem, "Developing Design Technology Project at Rover"

People in the Design Group



Alasdair, Laura, Janet, Surayya, Sophie, & Andrew.	Tom (top), & Jonny.

Peter Bentley Interested in everything to do with evolutionary computation, especially: GAs, 'creative' evolution of solid-object designs and architecture, evolution of fraud-detection systems, evolution of control systems, evolution of music, and memetics.
Laura Dekker Interested in topological aspects of stochastic search techniques, abstract data relationships, buildings and natural structures; developing mathematical expressions of 3D human body shape.
Jonny Farringdon Interested in web science, cognitive science, & learning systems - Soar, ANN, & GA/GP applied to design.
Andrew Fentem Computer-based facilitation of new product conceptual design processes.
Takashi Hattori Interested in user-interface systems, especially the use of constraint satisfaction techniques.
Surayya Khan Investigating the use of IT, especially AI, in the design and manufacture of clothing and textiles.
Ismail Ismail Interests include Strategic Information Systems Planning, Participatory Design, Human-Computer Interaction and Software Engineering Methodology.
Janet McDonnell Design research interests: the elicitation and representation of design knowledge, the modelling of design competence, (knowledge based) software architecture for supporting design decisions involving trade-offs and design justification.
Sophie Phillips Investigating the development of a domain specific, multimedia knowledge base, aimed at the clothing/textile industry, in order to provide design support during the product development process.
Tom Quick Interested in developing interpretivist semantics for information systems design.
Simone Stumpf Looking at argumentation in the design process, especially the relation of rhetorical argument and Schoen's model of designing and manipulation of the design process through argumentative structures
Alasdair Turner Investigating the use of intelligent techniques for computer aided design, development of sketch recognition tools.

Current Research Projects

Industry-funded project, developing 3D modelling and mapping techniques to use 3D optical surface scan data of the human body. Whole body scan data is being gathered to generate personal 3D models for medical applications and size-to-fit software for the clothing industry.
ESPRIT project ITEX: Information Technology for the Textile Industry - a broad and in-depth pan-European survey of IT gaps.
EPSRC-funded project to develop lay-planning techniques using a hybrid genetic algorithm and rule-based system.
EPSRC-funded project to develop 'fuzzy' design database browsing tools.
EPSRC-funded project to develop multi-media databases to capture knowledge acquired during the design, prototyping and production processes.
EPSRC/DTI-funded Intelligent Architecture project: interactive 3D object-oriented CAD, incorporating a hybrid intelligent toolkit for architectural design and master-planning.

We have an annual picnic in the summer...

Department of Computer Science

Last modified 28 Feb 2000, SCS