Expressiveness of the Design Exemplar

Abstract

As new representations are introduced to model various aspects of engineering design or to support computer aided design automation systems, these representations should be evaluated with respect to their intrinsic and extrinsic properties. One such property that is explored in this paper is “representational expressiveness”. This paper provides a systematic approach to exploring the expressiveness of new design representations by providing an evaluation of the design exemplar with respect to expressiveness. This expressiveness is decomposed into: coverage of vocabulary, flexibility of definition of vocabulary, type of vocabulary, mappability to existing representations, and support of basic design tasks. The design exemplar is examined with respect to these aspects of expressiveness, systematically laying a foundation for the intrinsic justification for basing future design automation systems on the principles of the design exemplar. This paper is not intended to be a comprehensive review of all aspects of the design exemplar. Rather, this paper is written to compel the design automation community to begin to develop a more systematic and reasoned approach in evaluating the automation systems and representations that are introduced in our research.