Communicating preferences in multiple criteria decision making - the role of the designer

Design decisions, in general, involve the balancing of potentially conflicting requirements as progress is made towards obtaining the most preferable design for a given application. Two important aspects of the above procedure are (i) the ability to create competing designs and (ii) to arrange a preference ordering over the same designs. This paper deals with the latter of the two aspects to examine how alternative expressions of designer preference influence methodological developments for the generation and ranking of candidate designs.