Designing across discipline borders : obstacle or option?

Educating technological designers is difficult. An educational curriculum should provide both sufficient discipline-related skills, and cross-disciplinary skills. In order to argue about the balance between the two, we speculate on the relation between disciplines and application domains, and we give some considerations as to what disciplinary baggage gives the best preparation for prospect interdisciplinary designers. Finally, we hint at a particular role for software designers in the process of designing across discipline borders

Discrete bilinear blending and its application in rendering curved surfaces

Bilinear blended patches (BBPs), though somewhat limited in their application to geometric modelling, can prove to be very useful as drawing primitives when rendering curved surfaces. An algorithm is described to generate discrete bilinear blending surfaces using integer arithmetic only. The algorithm is proven to be correct with respect to its formally stated specifications

Family of recursively defined curves, related to the cubic Bézier curve

Starting from elementary geometrical, combinatorial and algorithmic properties of recursively defined curves, a parametrized class of curves is defined that incorporates the cubic Bézier curve together with a continuous set of generalizations, and also a parametrized set of fractal curves. The shape of the latter may be controlled in a similar fashion to the smooth Bézier-like curves. Both the smooth and the fractal curves lead to a straightforward extension towards surface definitions