An architecture is disclosed for assistance with exploration of design and other decision spaces and for making decisions. These decision spaces may be very large. The architecture consists of three main components: A Seeker acquires candidates by generating or retrieving them, along with their scores according to one or more criteria. A Filter locates a relatively small number of promising candidates that are retained for further analysis. Various filters may be used to locate the promising candidates. A Viewer allows a user to examine trade-off diagrams, and other linked displays, that present the filtered candidates for evaluation, analysis, further exploration, and narrowing the choice set. The computational load of the Seeker may be distributed among a large number of clients in a client-server computing environment.