This paper discusses the integration of knowledge bases and shape grammars for the generation of building models, covering interaction, system, and implementation. Knowledge-based and generative systems are combined to construct a method for characterizing existing buildings, in particular, their interior layouts based on exterior features and certain other parameters such as location and real dimensions. The knowledge-based model contains information about spatial use, organization, elements, and contextual information, with the shape grammar principally containing style rules. Buildings are analyzed and layouts are generated through communication and interaction between these two systems. The benefit of using an interactive system is that the complementary properties of the two schemes are employed to strengthen the overall process. Ontologies capture knowledge relating to architectural design principles, building anatomy, structure, and systems. Shape grammar rules embody change through geometric manipulation and transformation. Existing buildings are analyzed using this approach, and three-dimensional models are automatically generated. Two particular building types, the vernacular rowhouse and high-rise apartment building, both from Baltimore, Maryland, are presented to illustrate the process and for comparing the utilized methodologies.

This paper provides a brief introduction to the field of creativity studies. After more than 60 years of scientific study, there is much that has been learned about how to teach and facilitate creative thinking. We review some of the well-known methods for fostering creativity on demand, as well as the research that has explored the efficacy of these approaches.

This paper interprets the concept of biologically inspired design as understanding design based on the biological evidence. Borrowing its concept of design competence from Chomsky's definition of linguistic competence, the paper reviews biological evidence from fields including evolution, genetics, and animal behavior from the perspective of design research to propose that design competence is the product of an evolutionary history during which five key developments in cognitive evolution came together: conception unbounded by sensory perception, symbolic manipulation at a level of metarepresentation, theory of mind, curiosity, and mental time travel. These cognitive capabilities were derived from the biological evidence based upon the criteria that they are presumed to be unique to humans (Homo sapiens), they may be lost because of neurodegenerative diseases or they may fail to develop because of neurodevelopmental disorders, and they are not immediately present upon birth and develop as a child's brain matures. Based on these five capabilities, the paper concludes by discussing how computation may provide a useful way to understand the origins and evolution of design competence.

The design studio has been, and will probably continue to be, the cornerstone of design education. Its major feature is the one-on-one desk critique (crit), in which student and teacher discuss the student's work in progress on a regular and frequent basis. The studio is a learning by doing environment, and the crit is the setting in which students acquire design skills and knowledge, under the guidance of the teacher. Design teachers are usually practitioners who receive no pedagogical training, and the effectiveness of their teaching depends on experience, awareness, and talent. Here we offer a detailed qualitative and quantitative representation of the crit through analyses of three case studies, which were collected in second-year architectural studios. We use two types of protocol analysis methods: coding of verbalizations and linkography, which looks at links among verbalizations. We show the diversity in teachers' performance and point to common trends. We propose that analyses of this kind may serve as a major feedback instrument in the framework of a badly needed pedagogical basis for design education.

Design creativity involves developing novel and useful solutions to design problems. The research in this article is an attempt to understand how novelty of a design resulting from a design process is related to the kind of outcomes, described here as constructs, involved in the design process. A model of causality, the SAPPhIRE model, is used as the basis of the analysis. The analysis is based on previous research that shows that designing involves development and exploration of the seven basic constructs of the SAPPhIRE model that constitute the causal connection between the various levels of abstraction at which a design can be described. The constructs are state change, action, parts, phenomenon, input, organs, and effect. The following two questions are asked. Is there a relationship between novelty and the constructs? If there is a relationship, what is the degree of this relationship? A hypothesis is developed to answer the questions: an increase in the number and variety of ideas explored while designing should enhance the variety of concept space, leading to an increase in the novelty of the concept space. Eight existing observational studies of designing sessions are used to empirically validate the hypothesis. Each designing session involves an individual designer, experienced or novice, solving a design problem by producing concepts and following a think-aloud protocol. The results indicate dependence of novelty of concept space on variety of concept space and dependence of variety of concept space on variety of idea space, thereby validating the hypothesis. The results also reveal a strong correlation between novelty and the constructs; correlation value decreases as the abstraction level of the constructs reduces, signifying the importance of using constructs at higher abstraction levels for enhancing novelty.

This paper presents a conceptual and computational framework to support experts in the design and manufacturing of high quality products. The framework is based on the development of specific knowledge artifacts characterized by tools for the management of functional, procedural, and experiential knowledge. As a case study, the GUITAR HERO project is presented. The project aims at building a knowledge-based system to support experts of a handicraft enterprise involved in the design and manufacturing of electric guitars characterized by an aluminum body. The domain of the project is extremely innovative, because electric guitars are typically manufactured with different kinds of wood rather than metals or other materials. To this aim, an ontological representation of the electric guitar has been implemented exploiting NavEditOW, a computational framework for the codification, navigation, and querying of ontologies over the Internet, based on the OWL language.

The growing movement of biologically inspired design is driven in part by the need for sustainable development and in part by the recognition that nature could be a source of innovation. Biologically inspired design by definition entails cross-domain analogies from biological systems to problems in engineering and other design domains. However, the practice of biologically inspired design at present typically is ad hoc, with little systemization of either biological knowledge for the purposes of engineering design or the processes of transferring knowledge of biological designs to engineering problems. In this paper we present an intricate episode of biologically inspired engineering design that unfolded over an extended period of time. We then analyze our observations in terms of why, what, how, and when questions of analogy. This analysis contributes toward a content theory of creative analogies in the context of biologically inspired design.

Biomimetics involves transfer from one or more biological examples to a technical system. This study addresses four questions. What are the essential steps in a biomimetic process? What is transferred? How can the transferred knowledge be structured in a way useful for biologists and engineers? Which guidelines can be given to support transfer in biomimetic design processes? In order to identify the essential steps involved in carrying out biomimetics, several procedures found in the literature were summarized, and four essential steps that are common across these procedures were identified. For identification of mechanisms for transfer, 20 biomimetic examples were collected and modeled according to a model of causality called the SAPPhIRE model. These examples were then analyzed for identifying the underlying similarity between each biological and corresponding analogue technical system. Based on the SAPPhIRE model, four levels of abstraction at which transfer takes place were identified. Taking into account similarity, the biomimetic examples were assigned to the appropriate levels of abstraction of transfer. Based on the essential steps and the levels of transfer, guidelines for supporting transfer in biomimetic design were proposed and evaluated using design experiments. The 20 biological and analogue technical systems that were analyzed were similar in the physical effects used and at the most abstract levels of description of their functionality, but they were the least similar at the lowest levels of abstraction: the parts involved. Transfer most often was carried out at the physical effect level of abstraction. Compared to a generic set of guidelines based on the literature, the proposed guidelines improved design performance by about 60%. Further, the SAPPhIRE model turned out to be a useful representation for modeling complex biological systems and their functionality. Databases of biological systems, which are structured using the SAPPhIRE model, have the potential to aid biomimetic concept generation.

User-centered approaches to design can guide teams toward an understanding of users and aid teams in better posing design problems. This paper investigates the role of user-centered design approaches in design process and outcome within the context of design team projects. The value of interaction with users is examined at several stages throughout the design process. The influence of user-centered design on the performance of design teams is also explored. Results suggest that the quantity of interactions with users and time spent interacting with users alone is not linked with better design outcome, but that iterative evaluation of concepts by users may be of particular value to design prototypes. Suggestions are made based on the reflections from the authors after conducting this study.

Two studies tested whether introducing images to designers during the design process lead to more useful design solutions as evaluated by the end users’ willingness to use the final design. It was hypothesized based on theories in cognitive science and design that there were at least two paths from images to usefulness. One path concerns analogically transferring within-domain properties to the design solution. The other path concerns mentally simulating end-user characteristics and preferences and inclusion of the user in the resulting design. Study 1 supported that random images led to increased outcome usefulness, and supported both hypothesized paths, by using within-domain products and end-user images as input. Study 2 showed that the image categories competed for attention, and that the within-domain product stimuli attracted the most attention and was considered the most inspirational to the designers. The practical use of the technique may lead to only marginally original products perhaps limiting its applicability to incremental innovation.

Engineering of complex systems often involves teamwork. The members of an engineering team must work together to identify design requirements, explore design spaces, generate design alternatives, and make both interactive and joint design decisions. Because of the latency of information and the disciplinary differences, it is often a difficult process for the members of a team to reach agreements when needed. Negotiation has been studied as a method for facilitating information exchange, mutual understanding, and joint decision making. An argumentation-based negotiation approach was previously proposed by the authors to support collaborative engineering design. In this paper, we present an experiment study that was conducted to evaluate the impact of this negotiation support approach on the process and the outcome of collaborative design. The results of the experiment show both positive effects and limitations of the approach.

Design research informs and supports practice by developing knowledge to improve the chances of producing successful products. Training in design research has been poorly supported. Design research uses human and natural/technical sciences, embracing all facets of design; its methods and tools are adapted from both these traditions. However, design researchers are rarely trained in methods from both the traditions. Research in traditional sciences focuses primarily on understanding phenomena related to human, natural, or technical systems. Design research focuses on supporting improvement of such systems, using understanding as a necessary but not sufficient step, and it must embrace methods for both understanding reality and developing support for its improvement. A one-semester, postgraduate-level, credited course that has been offered since 2002, entitled Methodology for Design Research, is described that teaches a methodology for carrying out research into design. Its steps are to clarify research success; to understand relevant phenomena of design and how these influence success; to use this to envision design improvement and develop proposals for supporting improvement; to evaluate support for its influence on success; and, if unacceptable, to modify, support, or improve the understanding of success and its links to the phenomena of design. This paper highlights some major issues about the status of design research and describes how design research methodology addresses these. The teaching material, model of delivery, and evaluation of the course on methodology for design research are discussed.

Conceptual design is a creative process. Designers create functions to satisfy customer needs and behaviors and forms to fulfill their functions. Although cognitive processes are at the center in developing new ideas, they are rarely taken into account in research and development of design support methods and systems. It is conceivable that if one understands how cognitive processes are stimulated to generate design ideas, then more effective methods and tools can be developed to support conceptual design. In this article, a cognitive model of conceptual design is developed to capture the relationships among design entities, design operations, and cognitive processes. A protocol analysis is performed to evaluate the model, and a cognitive experiment carried out to study the creative patterns and stimulating relationships. The results show that designers exhibit patterns of creative design behavior, and that these patterns can be captured and instilled into the design process to promote creativity.

Conceptual design is a vital part of the design process during which designers first envision new ideas and then synthesize them into physical configurations that meet certain design specifications. In this research, a suite of computational tools is developed that assists the designers in performing this nontrivial task of navigating the design space for creating conceptual design solutions. The methodology is based on automating the function-based synthesis paradigm by combining various computational methods. Accordingly, three nested search algorithms are developed and integrated to capture different design decisions at various stages of conceptual design. The implemented system provides a method for automatically generating novel alternative solutions to real design problems. The application of the approach to the design of an electromechanical device shows the method's range of capabilities and how it serves as a comparison to human conceptual design generation and as a tool suite to complement the skills of a designer.

This paper summarizes various aspects of identifying and applying biological analogies in engineering design using a natural-language approach. To avoid the immense as well as potentially biased task of creating a biological database specifically for engineering design, the chosen approach searches biological knowledge in natural-language format, such as books and papers, for instances of keywords describing the engineering problem. Strategies developed to facilitate this search are identified, and how text descriptions of biological phenomena are used in problem solving is summarized. Several application case studies are reported to illustrate the approach. The value of the natural-language approach is demonstrated by its ability to identify relevant biological analogies that are not limited to those entered into a database specifically for engineering design.