An optimized functional design space exploration method for multimedia applications is proposed. The basis of the method is a way of representing the dependency and the concurrency of an application in a compact form exploiting algebraic operators and expressions. The optimized design process consists of mapping one of the possible expressions in the application space onto a concurrent architecture. We use the Metropolis design framework to demonstrate the effectiveness of the procedure using an FPGA architecture as the target implementation platform. The advantage of using this platform is the availability of models that approximate well the performance of the final implementation when performing the mapping from function to architecture thus yielding a robust design methodology.