Context-Based Visual Design Language for Shape Generation

Abstract

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.