Reint-ops - a tool supporting conceptual design

Reasoning is influenced by our perception of the environment. New aspects of our environment help to provoke new thoughts. Thus, changes of what is perceived can be assumed to stimulate the generation of new ideas, as well. In CAD, computerized three-dimensional models of physical entities are produced. Their representation on the monitor is determined by our viewing position and by the rendering method used. Especially the wire-frame representations of views lend themselves to a variety of readings, due to coincident and intersecting lines. Methods by whick wire-frame views can be processed to extract the shapes that they contain have been investigated and developed. The extracted shapes can be used as a base for the generation of derived entities through various operations that are called Reinterpretation Operations. They have been implemented as a prototypical extension (named Reint-Ops) to an existing modeling shell. Reint-Ops is a highly interactive exploratory CAD tool, which all ows the user to customize criteria and factors which are used in the reinterpretation process. This tool can be regarded as having a potential to support conceptual design investigations.