Visualisation in design

Design, whether of circuits or bridges or large software packages, is exceedingly difficult. It is usually iterative and involves, at each evaluation stage, the interpretation of a great deal of data. This data is almost entirely numeric: it can relate to global properties of a circuit-such as whether it is operating within a dissipation limit-or to detailed properties such as the voltage on node 27 at a frequency of 2.37 MHz. Since human beings, especially when making a qualitative judgement, appear to be able to interpret suitably designed images much more easily than numbers, the transformation from the latter to the former is of considerable interest to designers of computer-aided design tools. The authors use the term visualisation to refer to the process of gaining insight from a graphical display of data. The authors discussion is brief