Subjectivity and objectivity in design decisions

All design decisions consist of subjective and objective parts. The former is evident at initial stages, whereas the latter is apparent toward the end. This paper introduces a subjective–objective spectrum to make explicit the composition of these two parts in design decisions and a synthesis design framework to support the smooth transition between them. This domain-independent framework has two components: for the subjective part, a preference-aggregation model accumulates multiple individual preferences into a single team preference to drive synthesis reasoning; for the objective part, a logic-based synthesis reasoning model systematically guides the designers in transforming abstract intents to concrete solutions.