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In order for a designer to communicate his or her ideas to colleagues, customers, and the public, images are often used to augment or replace text or the spoken word. Today these images are usually visual and monoscopic. However already it is possible to produce stereoscopic, volumetric, and immersive visual images. It is also possible to produce surround, environmental, or binaural sound images, and rudimentary haptic (tactile and force) images can also be created. We already form images in our mind based on music, and a pleasingly constructed pictorial image can portray a visual symphony. Images are also already created in the form of physical representations of objects by rapid prototyping techniques and these too are considered as being within the sphere of design imaging. In the future all of the senses may be able to be utilised to produce mixed modality images that will create an extremely stimulating and information rich environment.We perceive the world and our relationship to it through a large number of senses, i.e. our five Aristotolean senses of vision, audition, olfaction, taction, and gustation, plus our kinaesthetic sense and others. In fact we usually experience the world, and form our opinions of it, based on an integration of one or more of these senses. It is therefore important to consider that participants in the design process and end users of a design will perceive the design through all of these senses.As well as the visual appearance of a product, e.g. a car, the designer may also include consideration of the noise the doors make on closing (audition), the texture of the upholstery (taction), and the smell of the interior (olfaction). The designer may also include sound as a means of selling the design through sonic branding . In advertisements music is used to influence the emotions, e.g. excitement, peace, or urgency, in the anticipation that these moods will be associated with the product.This is a broad and interdisciplinary topic, members of the initial core cluster come from backgrounds including design, computer graphics, virtual reality, visual and musical arts, display technology, communications, psychology and telepresence. It is hoped that this group will be unique in that it will be composed of people who rarely, if ever, get the opportunity to work together. The combination of experience and talent should provide a mix from which should emerge new ideas that will contribute to the creativity and effectiveness of the design process. The topic has the potential to be exciting, revolutionary, attract interest from researchers with an increasing variety of disciplines as the project progresses, and contribute significantly to the UK economy and quality of life.The focus of the cluster will be to examine how images of any type, but particularly multi-modal, can be utilised in the interests of improving design. This implies the use of images as an aid to creativity at the concept and detail design stages, the use of images as a means of communication in the design process and with the public in general, and the use of images as a means of enhancing co-operation between everyone involved in the value chain.
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