Scout: Mixed-Initiative Exploration of Design Variations through High-Level Design Constraints

Amanda Swearngin, Amy J. Ko, James Fogarty

Abstract: Although the exploration of variations is a key part of interface design, current processes for creating variations are mostly manual. We present Scout, a system that helps designers explore many variations rapidly through mixed-initiative interaction with high-level constraints and design feedback. Past constraint-based layout systems use low-level spatial constraints and mostly produce only a single design. Scout advances upon these systems by introducing high-level constraints based on design concepts (e.g. emphasis). With Scout, we have formalized several high-level constraints into their corresponding low-level spatial constraints to enable rapidly generating many designs through constraint solving and program synthesis.