  An important new trend in additive manufacturing is the use of optimization
to automatically design industrial objects, such as beams, rudders or wings.
Topology optimization, as it is often called, computes the best configuration
of material over a 3D space, typically represented as a grid, in order to
satisfy or optimize physical parameters. Designers using these automated
systems often seek to understand the interaction of physical constraints with
the final design and its implications for other physical characteristics. Such
understanding is challenging because the space of designs is large and small
changes in parameters can result in radically different designs. We propose to
address these challenges using a visualization approach for exploring the space
of design solutions. The core of our novel approach is to summarize the space
(ensemble of solutions) by automatically selecting a set of examples and to
represent the complete set of solutions as combinations of these examples. The
representative examples create a meaningful parameterization of the design
space that can be explored using standard visualization techniques for
high-dimensional spaces. We present evaluations of our subset selection
technique and that the overall approach addresses the needs of expert
designers.
