Interactive design galleries: A general approach to interacting with design alternatives

Designers work by exploring alternatives. While extant parametric modelers theoretically define alternatives, their interfaces generally provide access to designs serially. Our goal is to change this near-universal feature of parametric interfaces to support exploration using multiple alternatives. We built a prototype gallery system on a web browser that supports saving alternatives from three graph-based parametric modeling tools. Users can retrieve alternatives from the gallery, share them with others, and combine them to generate more alternatives. We evaluated this system qualitatively in a workshop with ten expert designers working on their own design problems. We learnt that users prefer the gallery to their accustomed workarounds. The study produced several directions for new user interface designs.