TILE: An interactive, multi-touch generative system for designing and placing architectural tiles

In this paper we describe TILE, a novel system for the interactive design and exploration of architectural tiling patterns. Many contemporary architectural designs employ tiled surfaces including walls, floors, windows and roofs. Surprisingly, a significant portion of such design work is arranged manually by architects, which is both tedious and time consuming. The software described here operates on a large multi-touch table and facilitates the rapid creation of tiling regions of user-specified form overlaid on architectural plans. Within these regions arbitrary repetitive tile designs may be generated using the basic bricking patterns. Also, unique and complex tile designs based on the style of artist M.C. Escher may be interactively created and tested on the plan. The software exports the tiling patterns to standard CAD software for incorporation into 3D architectural models. It has been developed in conjunction with a practising architectural firm.