ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces the activities and associated output of the ‘Discovery in Design: People-centred Computational Issues (DiD)’ cluster established in March 2005 under the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Council ‘Designing for the 21st Century’ Initiative. The DiD cluster objective has been to identify primary research aspects concerning the development of people-centred computational design environments that engender concept and knowledge discovery across diverse disciplines and domains. The utility of established and emerging computational intelligence, enabling computational technologies and people-centred issues have been investigated across a diverse set of problem domains relating to widely differing disciplines to identify synergies and to separate and distill peculiarities. A significant proportion of the generated knowledge is however tacit and will require more ‘teasing-out’ through further interactive sessions. The establishment of the Institute for People-centred Computation and the associated Network funding will support this activity and the further analysis of the cluster data which will also contribute significantly to initial Institute workshops.
