CAMBRIA: Interacting with Multiple CAD Alternatives

Computer-aided design (CAD) tools aim to assist designers in their professional work, one key aspect of which is devising, evaluating, and choosing among multiple design alternatives. Yet, with few and limited exceptions, current tools handle just a single design model at a time, forcing users to adopt various ad hoc tactics for handling multiple design alternatives. Despite considerable prior work, there are no general, effective strategies for supporting design alternatives. New tools are needed to develop such strategies: to learn how designers’ behavior changes with support for multiple alternatives. In this article, we describe CAMBRIA, a multi-state prototype tool we developed for working with multiple 2D parametric CAD models in parallel. We describe the outcomes of an analytical evaluation of CAMBRIA using the Cognitive Dimensions framework.