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Styling is a creative activity where the designer’s goal is to define a product that evokes a certain emotion while satisfying the imposed constraints. Therefore, a better understanding of human reactions can allow an easier satisfaction of market wishes and tastes. On the other hand, the complete design of new products requires multidisciplinary expertise and consequently it results from the collaboration of several actors. It is then clear that the formalization of the design intent underlying the product specification may improve the communication quality among the involved actors, who can belong to different departments in the same company, e.g. styling and engineering, or to external suppliers.

In addition the formalization of the relationships between shape and aesthetic character included in a computer system may help designers to achieve their goal more directly. In fact, even if the introduction of digital tools in the styling workflow in the last twenty years has significantly shortened the development time and costs, some critical issues have still to be faced and overcome to move towards an ideal optimised digital design process, in which the design intent is automatically communicated and preserved throughout all the process phases.

Engineering conceptual design can be regarded as that phase of the engineering de-sign process during which the designer takes a specification for a product to be de-signed and generates many broad solutions for it. Each of these broad solutions is generally referred to as a scheme [7]; however, in this paper we will interchangeably use the terms scheme, design and concept. It is generally accepted that conceptual design is one of the most critical phases of the product development process. It has been reported that more than 75% of a product’s total cost is dictated by decisions made during the conceptual phase of design and that poor conceptual design can never be compensated for at the detailed design stage [10].

The technology presented here has many features that are crucial for supporting designers during the conceptual phase of design. For example, designers can specify an initial statement describing the desired properties of the required artifact. The designer is free to modify this at any time by adding/removing constraints. Further-more, the designer has the freedom to approach the design process in any way he wishes.

The hardware technology that underlies computer systems has improved so rapidly and continuously for more than four decades that the ground rules for system design are constantly subject to change. It takes many years for knowledge and experience to be compiled, digested, and presented in the form of a book, so books about computer systems often seem dated or obsolete by the time they appear in print.

Even though some underlying principles are unchanging, the rapid obsolescence of details acts to discourage prospective book authors, and as a result some important ideas are never documented in books. For this reason, an essential part of the study of computer systems is found in current and, frequently, older technical papers, professional journal articles, research reports, and occasional, unpublished memoranda that circulate among active workers in the field.

Version 11 of the Unicon language includes 3D graphics facilities. This document describes the design of the Unicon 3D graphics facilities, and provides several examples detailing their use. Most application programming interfaces for writing 3D computer graphics applications are complicated and difficult to master. Toolkits such as OpenGL [OpenGL00] and Open Inventor are powerful, but several weeks or even months are needed to gain proficiency. Even after gaining proficiency, many lines of code are required to implement most features. There is much that can be simplified.

Unicon [Jeffery03] is a superset of the Icon programming language [Griswold96] that offers many features that minimize the time and effort spent programming. Programs written in Unicon require from two to ten times fewer lines of code than programs written in languages such as C, C++, or Java. This report describes a set of simple, easy to use 3D graphics facilities for Unicon.