Challenges in Creating Effective Automated Design Environments: An experience report from the domain of generative manufacturing

The emergence of powerful automated design tools in many domains is changing the nature of design, as human-intensive activities can be increasingly off-loaded to those tools. Rather than having a human consider only handful of options, as has been done historically, such tools now enable the generation of a large space of potential designs, exhibiting different tradeoffs among competing qualities of merit, and supporting systematic exploration of the design space. At the same time, this paradigm raises new challenges centered on enabling humans to effectively navigate that generated space in order to select a design that best meets their requirements. In this paper we describe our experience in the domain of generative manufacturing, in which we developed a novel design environment for airplane parts manufacturing that incorporates a number of sophisticated design tools and attempts to tackle the emergent problems of design space exploration that are faced by designers of those parts. We use this experience to highlight the challenges that we faced and reflect on their applicability more generally to tool-assisted software design environments.