Modelling the design spaces of construction kits

Construction Kits (CKs) are a fundamental tool for the generation and communication of ideas. First appearing as a means to support children's development through the building of models, they have since been used to support the learning of languages and physical environments. The application of CKs to support New Product Development (NPD) is also well established where they are used extensively to support the creation and sharing of ideas. They have been particularly successful in supporting configuration design tasks, such as city, town, office and manufacturing facilities planning, where stakeholders from multiple disciplines come together to design.

Whilst their ubiquity across society is apparent, it is surprising to see that there is little research on how a CK represents and constrains the design space. The manner in which a CK constrains the design space may have profound effects on the solutions generated by individuals as well as supporting the development of their problem solving skills. This poster presents the development of code that utilises High-Performance Computing (HPC) to compute the design spaces of CKs so that a better understanding of this phenemona can be developed.