A community learns design: towards a pattern language for novice visual programmers

Templates have emerged as an effective approach to simplifying the visualization design and programming process. For example, they enable users to quickly generate multiple visualization designs even when using complex toolkits like D3. However, these templates are often treated as rigid artifacts that respond poorly to changes made outside of the template’s established parameters, limiting user creativity. Preserving the user’s creative flow requires a more dynamic approach to template-based visualization design, where tools can respond gracefully to users’ edits when they modify templates in unexpected ways. In this paper, we leverage the structural similarities revealed by templates to design resilient support features for prototyping D3 visualizations: recommendations to suggest complementary interactions for a users’ D3 program; and code augmentation to implement recommended interactions with a single click, even when users deviate from pre-defined templates. We demonstrate the utility of these features in Mirny, a design-focused prototyping environment for D3. In a user study with 20 D3 users, we find that these automated features enable participants to prototype their design ideas with significantly fewer programming iterations. We also characterize key modification strategies used by participants to customize D3 templates. Informed by our findings and participants’ feedback, we discuss the key implications of the use of templates for interleaving visualization programming and design.

This study estimated availability of an air compression system and a nitrogen generation system in liquefied natural gas—floating production storage and offloading unit (LNG-FPSO) with different design stages to investigate the gap between the availability at the early design stage and that at the late design stage. Although availability estimation in the early design stage is more important than the late design stage, it is difficult to estimate the availability accurately in the early design stage. The design stage was divided into three depending on the design progress. Monte Carlo simulation technique was employed for the availability estimation. The results of the availability estimation showed that there was 0.434% difference between the early and late design stages. This meant that the availability in the early design stage was underestimated due to limited information. A sensitivity analysis was performed to investigate critical factors affecting the results. The investigated factors were failure rate, repair time, redundant equipment, and modified preventive maintenance schedule. The most critical factor was redundant equipment. It increased 0.486% availability.

We present and report on Design Exposition Discussion Documents (DExDs), a new means of fostering collaboration between visualization designers and domain experts in applied visualization research. DExDs are a collection of semi-interactive web-based documents used to promote design discourse: to communicate new visualization designs, and their underlying rationale, and to elicit feedback and new design ideas. Developed and applied during a four-year visual data analysis project in criminal intelligence, these documents enabled a series of visualization re-designs to be explored by crime analysts remotely - in a flexible and authentic way. The DExDs were found to engender a level of engagement that is qualitatively distinct from more traditional methods of feedback elicitation, supporting the kind of informed, iterative and design-led feedback that is core to applied visualization research. They also offered a solution to limited and intermittent contact between analyst and visualization researcher and began to address more intractable deficiencies, such as social desirability-bias, common to applied visualization projects. Crucially, DExDs conferred to domain experts greater agency over the design process - collaborators proposed design suggestions, justified with design knowledge, that directly influenced the re-redesigns. We provide context that allows the contributions to be transferred to a range of settings.

Visual communication design and space design is discussed in this paper the complementary relationship between, it is worth mentioning that the visual communication design can be a good blend of collision and space design, so the analysis of the blend mode in the design of visual communication design elements in space, and space visual design elements of law, more reasonable and effective use of visual communication design elements in space design activities for better design services, become a carrier capacity and environmental design in visual communication design concept, therefore, in the design of the two classify, between the two cannot be away from each other, can only promote better design complement each other. As is known to all, the most direct contact between human beings in this world is vision, also known as sight and sight, followed by hearing, smelling and tasting. Therefore, the more intuitive feelings of human beings will be conveyed by vision. In 1960, the term ＂visual communication＂ popular in the world design congress held in Japan, including printed newspapers and magazines, posters and other promotional material design, and television, movies, electronic billboards and other media, through the eyes to convey to the brain for modelling of expressive design is widely referred to as visual communication design, there's a phrase can express: show people design, design. Moreover, in the design of contemporary exhibition space, visual communication design elements are often used. These design elements not only have the function of transmitting information, but also have unlimited commercial value and propaganda effect. Left the concept of positioning, space design is only the so-called functional platter; Ignore the visual communication of visual language, no matter how good the environment will be due to graphic design style gap and left a failure. As we know, one of the most important functions of visual communication design elements is to help present the most complete visual effect in the spatial display. The organic connection between visual communication design and display space design not only harmonizes the relationship between two-dimensional plane and three-dimensional space environment, but also expands the cooperation between subjects and strengthens the research space between the two design disciplines. Only in this way can designers solve complex and comprehensive problems and help designers make full use of their advantages to create better works.

Effective design collaboration during the early design stages in architecture is a condition for effective overall design and construction. This can be facilitated, supported and promoted through visual technological means. Collaborative design protocols implemented within the engineering fields (electrical and mechanical) can be adapted to the built environment design with emerging augmented reality technologies being the enablers for that shift. Architectural design requires a strongly visual approach to communication and means through which multiple disciples can collaborate effectively. Therefore, the aim of the research is to investigate principles and protocols to assist early design stage collaborative design among multidisciplinary teams, through visual and tactile user interfaces. This paper explores the current paradigm in AEC (architecture, engineering and construction), design collaboration and multidisciplinary group dynamics during the early design and conceptual stages in architecture. Afterwards, a design protocol is suggested, literature review regarding collaborative design and design protocols is summarized and further research is proposed on optimization and standardization of early design collaborative design in AEC.

Due to the problem of the often changes of users' requirements leading to many modifications of code, on basis of several technologies such as visual development, Persistent object and design patterns, using object-oriented analysis and design and development methods, we design LAppDesigner (Linux Application Designer): the database application customizing tool based on Linux driven by database with functions of visual customizing and dynamic making of simple database application, to create prototype system adapting to limited changes of userpsilas requirements. We implement most of functions of LAppDesigner in this paper by using development tool Delphi for Linux.

How effective is a legal system that people cannot understand how to navigate? As more people try to navigate the civil justice system as self-represented litigants, there is more awareness about the importance of self-help tools that can build legal capability. If there is more effective self-help, then this can improve the quality of justice, both procedural and substantive, that people experience in the legal system. Yet there is little study of how and whether self-help can be effective in building legal capability, and which kinds of visuals, digital tools, or interactions are most effective at engaging people and helping them navigate the legal system. This paper builds off the nascent literature on how design can improve people’s navigation of complex bureaucratic systems, to conduct an exploratory design research into effective self-help for traffic court. It documents the participatory design process, lightweight exploratory evaluation method, and the findings on which type of self-help has the most promise for this area of court. It finds that visual design patterns have value, but that digital tools are needed to get user engagement and impact on outcomes.

We present a search engine for D3 visualizations that allows queries based on their visual style and underlying structure. To build the engine we crawl a collection of 7860 D3 visualizations from the Web and deconstruct each one to recover its data, its data-encoding marks and the encodings describing how the data is mapped to visual attributes of the marks. We also extract axes and other non-data-encoding attributes of marks (e.g., typeface, background color). Our search engine indexes this style and structure information as well as metadata about the webpage containing the chart. We show how visualization developers can search the collection to find visualizations that exhibit specific design characteristics and thereby explore the space of possible designs. We also demonstrate how researchers can use the search engine to identify commonly used visual design patterns and we perform such a demographic design analysis across our collection of D3 charts. A user study reveals that visualization developers found our style and structure based search engine to be significantly more useful and satisfying for finding different designs of D3 charts, than a baseline search engine that only allows keyword search over the webpage containing a chart.

Some important parameters of the machine tool layout have to be selected in the early stages of design when a shortage of information makes application of the finite element method impractical. As a computer-aided tool in these stages, the form-shaping function (FSF)-based approach can be used. It allows evaluation of the kinematic and geometric errors and compliance issue static deformations, which contribute significantly to the total machining error as applied to precision machine tools. The FSF-based methodology gives important information allowing layouts’ comparison and structure optimization under uncertainty in requirements and limitations relating to the designed machine under strong time constraints. Six different layouts of a turning center are investigated to compare the effect of geometrical errors and compliance of machine structure on part accuracy in the range of less than five microns. Motion errors of machine tool components were measured by laser equipment during machine tool assembly and inspection. Compliance-induced errors are included in the evaluation to take into consideration cutting forces. Obtained data were used as the input for simulation of machining a sample workpiece—a sphere whose size, position, and form errors are used as criteria for layout comparison. Since the FSF-based results correlate well with the experimental data, the developed approach can be considered as an effective tool for application in the early stages of machine design.

Techno-economic analysis of hybrid high performance MSF desalination plant with NF membrane

The paper proposes a visual programming methodology based on the formalised dataflow diagram language PrM. The resulting approach seamlessly integrates all phases of information system development from early analysis to final implementation because the same visual language is applied throughout. The paper describes the PrM language and discusses visual programming in PrM based on menu selection of predefined graphical templates. The possibility of user-specified template types is considered. Generation of production code from visual PrM programs is explained, as well as prototype generation from unfinished specifications. The PrM language has been implemented, and the practicality of the proposed methodology is discussed in relation to this CASE tool. >

Visual programming language research has evolved greatly since its early days. At first, attempts at visual programming mostly took the form of flowchart-like diagrams. But in recent years, a wide number of innovative approaches have been incorporated into visual languages, including object-oriented programming, form-based programming, programming by demonstration, and dataflow programming. Unfortunately, while many of these systems represent important ideas, only a few have been successful as complete visual programming languages. This tutorial explains why this is true, and describes ways in which the problem can be addressed. This tutorial explores the issues behind the successes and failures of earlier approaches from a design perspective. It identifies characteristics of successful visual programming languages, and explains how to design an object-oriented language that maintains those characteristics. It shows solutions to a number of problems by looking at existing visual programming languages, including Prograph.

With the rapid development of modern science and technology, visual communication design is also full of longing for modern technology. The emergence of new media has greatly changed the path of information dissemination and expanded the scope of visual communication design to a certain extent. Designers' creative thinking and visual expression methods have become more diverse, and visual language and design have broken the limitations of previous media, bringing creators greater creative space. Studying visual communication design art from the perspective of new media can provide good guidance for the development of cultural and technological industries, and also provide some help for the progress of human spiritual civilization. Therefore, it is of great significance to pay attention to the innovation and development of visual communication design in the era of new media.

Design development is an expensive process and time consuming. A design language system assists design development. The system is highly used to investigate design characteristics in many design studies. The high volume of research interprets it as design elements and principles analysis to deliver consistent visual aesthetics. The absences of meaning and context significantly impact the quality of visual design communication and create design ambiguities. To fulfil the mentioned issues, this research extends harmonised shape grammar (HSG) to develop a context-based visual design language (CVD). The proposed framework provides semantics and pragmatics levels of analysis to bring meaning and context to a visual design communication. Visual communication and language communication share the similarity in fundamental concepts. A context-based visual design language adopts grammatical design and natural language processing approaches to analyse visual communication requirements. Grammatical design provides generative design development when natural language processing analyses levels of language communication. In linguistics, morphological units (morphemes) form a vocabulary. Vocabularies construct a sentence following a grammar structure. A semantically well-formed sentence provides meaning. Meaningful sentences combine pragmatically to achieve a successful communication. In the design aspect, one must speak a language of design. However, speaking does not guarantee a successful communication. This research aims at defining a framework to create a set of meaningful visual design language in order to achieve a visual communication correspondingly to the way natural language can in linguistics.

Constructability is a concept with relative and not absolute value to increase optimization capacity of resources such as workforce, time, cost, quality, and working environment conditions. Given the growing complexity of projects and the increased number of failed and abandoned projects, the necessity to implement constructability in projects has become more tangible. Although the effects of lack of quantitative definition of constructability role in the traditional construction approaches are evident and have led to lack of coordination in performance of construction projects, so far no comprehensive quantitative approach has been considered to analyze the obstacles to constructability implementation. This study aims to identify and categorize the obstacles to facilitating the presence of contractors in the early stages of planning and design to implement constructability. In this study a comprehensive list of obstacles to constructability implementation is developed as a questionnaire. This questionnaire was presented to the experts, active in the field of construction. Finally, its results were analyzed using exploratory factor analysis method. Totally, 63 obstacles were questioned, then they were categorized by some of the experts of this industry into five categories of macro factors, including contractual, environmental, managerial, technical, and organizational. The significance of this study is due to this fact that identifying and categorizing the key obstacles to constructability implementation provides a useful reference for managers and owners of the construction industry to identify and develop solutions to resolve them. Identifying the obstacles to the presence of contractors in the planning and design stage and having a quantitative view toward this issue affects project implementability. In this regard, one can present more effective solutions to facilitate the presence of contractors in the early stages of design and also improves the effectiveness of constructability.