Closing in on an Open Problem: Reasons and a Strategy to Encode Emergent Subshapes

Abstract

The interpretation of drawings, by breaking them into subshapes and classifying these subshapes, is an essential part of creative designing. Drawings must be open to different interpretations - i.e. different decompositions into parts, and classification of these parts in different ways - but conventional CAD systems do not readily allow this. Their data structures are too inflexible, and they do not provide subshape or implied-shape recognition capabilities. This paper discusses the centrality of emergent forms in the design process and proposes a datastructure based on construction lines and ordered lists which enables shapes as collection of lines and arcs to be efficiently encoded. The strategy to build a design tool around this data structure is also presented.