Design consists of analyzing scenarios and proposing artifacts, obeying the initial set of requirements that lead from initial to goal state. Finding or creating alternative solutions, analyzing them, and selecting the best one are expected steps in the designer’s decision making process. Very often, not a sole designer, but a team of them is engaged in the design process, sharing their expertise and responsibility to achieve optimum projects. In a design team, most conflicts
occur due to misunderstanding of one’s assessment of specifications and contexts. Decision explanations play a key
role in teamwork success. Designers are rational agents trained to follow rational methods. Acceptable justifications
include value function, requirements, constraints, and criteria. Generally, explanations are delivered in a multimedia
fashion, composed of text, graphics and gestures, to provide the audience the ability to perceive what was contextually
imagined. The more spatial the reasoning is, the richer the explanation channel should be. This paper presents CineADD,
a design explanation generation model based on cinema techniques such as animation, scripting, editing, and camera
movements. The idea is to provide designers with a tool for describing the way their projects should be visually
explained, as in a movie. Designers develop their projects in an active design document environment. Rationale is
captured as a design model, so explanations can be generated instead of retrieved. The captured design model serves as
a base to visually reconstruct design, giving emphasis and guidance by using movie storytelling techniques. CineADD
was implemented for the domain of oil pipeline layout showing the feasibility of this approach. We expect CineADD
to become a commodity attachable to any intelligent CAD system.
Design explanation: determining the constraints on what can be alive
