TYRO: a constraint based graphic designer's apprentice

'TYRO', the (very novice) graphic designer's apprentice is a visual programming environment to enhance the exploration and evolution of graphic design concepts. The basic unit of design knowledge, the prototype, is represented as a network of constraining relations with rules for asserting those relations. Similarly, a design is a constraint network of prototypes with its set of assertion rules. The environment supports multiple simultaneous perspectives on each object (logical, spatial and hierarchical browsers) and a variation generator used for exploring the design space and discovering the assertion rule breakpoints.<>