The structure interference method (SIM) is introduced as a new method to obtain material characteristic functions from indirect measurements, e.g. getting real space information from scattering data. Based on the demand that the solution should not depend on its discretisation, SIM produces a physically meaningful solution without prior assumptions concerning e.g. shape or smoothness of the admissible solutions. The method is designed for massively parallel computer systems and workstation cluster, but stand alone workstations or high-performance personal computers are suitable also. The author uses SIM to get real space information from small-angle X-ray scattering data, however the method can be applied to other ill-posed or inverse problems easily.