ABSTRACT

This chapter describes the research of a multidisciplinary community of academic and industrial researchers/practitioners who were awarded Phase 2 Designing for the 21st Century Research Initiative funding to establish a fully integrated framework for people-centred computational environments for design discovery. This project team initally developed a strong working relationship within the Discovery in Design: People-centred Computational Issues cluster (DiD) funded through Phase 1 of the Initiative. The DiD cluster established a cross-disciplinary understanding of requirements for a generic, people-centred computational environment to support conceptual design. This was achieved through an initial exploration of multidisciplinary requirements, possible computational structure and people-centred issues relating to complex, generic conceptual design systems. These cluster activities continued within the Institute for People-Centred Computation (IPCC)1 established under EPSRC network funding.