design-research-problems

A library of benchmark tasks for design research.

What This Library Does

design-research-problems provides structured design tasks spanning ideation, decision-making, optimization, grammar-based design exploration, and MCP-backed workflows. We use it to package reusable task definitions with clear metadata, evaluators, and domain structure.

Highlights

  • Text prompts

  • Decision problems

  • Optimization problems

  • Grammar problems

  • MCP-backed tasks

  • Typed metadata

Different problem families support different forms of inquiry. Text problems are well suited for prompt-based and human-subjects studies. Optimization problems support algorithmic benchmarking. Grammar problems support constructive search and sequential design behavior. MCP-backed tasks connect studies to external execution systems.

Typical Workflow

  1. Browse the catalog and choose a family aligned with the study question.

  2. Load a problem and inspect state, constraints, prompt content, or evaluator behavior.

  3. Generate candidate solutions or trajectories.

  4. Evaluate outputs and collect artifacts.

  5. Hand tasks to agents directly or bind them into studies via experiments.

Integration With The Ecosystem

The Design Research Collective maintains a modular ecosystem of libraries for studying human and AI design behavior.

  • design-research-agents implements AI participants, workflows, and tool-using reasoning patterns.

  • design-research-problems provides benchmark design tasks, prompts, grammars, and evaluators.

  • design-research-analysis analyzes the traces, event tables, and outcomes generated during studies.

  • design-research-experiments sits above the stack as the study-design and orchestration layer, defining hypotheses, factors, conditions, replications, and artifact flows across agents, problems, and analysis.

Together these libraries support end-to-end design research pipelines, from study design through execution and interpretation.

Ecosystem diagram showing experiments above agents, problems, and analysis.

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