SITUATED COMPUTING- A New Paradigm for Design Computing

JOHN S. GERO

Key Centre of Design Computing and Cognition

University of Sydney

Abstract. 

This paper introduces the concepts of situatedness and constructive memory as the foundations of situated computing. The difference is between encoding all knowledge prior to its use and allowing the knowledge to be developed and grounded in the interaction between the external world and the designer/tool. The paper elaborates these concepts and concludes with a discussion of the implication of situated computing on computational models of designing and on the development of adaptive design tools.

Introduction

Design computing involves all facets of the use of computers to support the acts of designing. Much of the research in design computing has been focused on modeling and representing designed objects, whether for the individual designer or for teams of designers using the World Wide Web.

There has continued to be an interest in computational aids that support designing more directly and in producing different design environments. Amongst the former are evolutionary systems and amongst the latter are virtual environments. All of this work is based a paradigm of computing that assumes that the underlying programs are unchanged by their use and certainly the underlying programs are not affected by where or how they are used. This is one of the foundations of objective knowledge: it is independent of who uses and what is done with it. We expect this of our objective knowledge. Objective knowledge is knowledge about the structure of the world. Thus, we expect that an object in a CAD model is unchanged by the view we present of it; that the algorithm that calculates shadows is unchanged by whomever uses it; and that the evolutionary algorithm used in a layout program is unchanged by using it on different types of problems.

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