AI-Assisted Design Concept Exploration Through Character Space Construction.

Shin Sano,Seiji Yamada

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2021.819237

Abstract

We propose an AI-assisted design concept exploration tool, the “Character Space Construction” (“CSC”). Concept designers explore and articulate the target product aesthetics and semantics in language, which is expressed using “Design Concept Phrases” (“DCPs”), that is, compound adjective phrases, and contrasting terms that convey what are not their target design concepts. Designers often utilize this dichotomy technique to communicate the nature of their aesthetic and semantic design concepts with stakeholders, especially in an early design development phase. The CSC assists this designers' cognitive activity by constructing a “Character Space” (“CS”), which is a semantic quadrant system, in a structured manner. A CS created by designers with the assistance of the CSC enables them to discern and explain their design concepts in contrast with opposing terms. These terms in a CS are retrieved and combined in the CSC by using a knowledge graph. The CSC presents terms and phrases as lists of candidates to users from which users will choose in order to define the target design concept, which is then visualized in a CS. The participants in our experiment, who were in the “arts and design” profession, were given two conditions under which to create DCPs and explain them. One group created and explained the DCPs with the assistance of the proposed CSC, and the other did the same task without this assistance, given the freedom to use any publicly available web search tools instead. The result showed that the group assisted by the CSC indicated their tasks were supported significantly better, especially in exploration, as measured by the Creativity Support Index (CSI).

Highlights

Our research is motivated by an observation in the professional industrial design domain and a research question derived from it: “could concept designers’ creative activities, especially verbalizing novel design concept phrase, be modeled and computationally supported?” The concept design used in industrial design is primarily concerned with developing the aesthetics and semantics of products (Krippendorff, 2005)
Notice that Cartabiano expressed a type of aesthetics and semantics to be avoided, that is, “a laptop on wheels, an Abbreviations: CSC, character space construction; Character Space” (CS), character space; Design Concept Phrase” (DCP), design concept phrase; Creativity Support Index (CSI), creativity support index; MDS, multidimensional scaling
These practices are traditionally highly empirical, informal, undocumented, and sometimes even secretive due to the strict confidentiality of the industry. It tends to be dependent upon the individual experiences of designers. We modeled this process as generating a compound adjective phrase that best conceptualizes the nature of the design aesthetics and semantics and constructing a CS to explain them in contrast with an opposing or distinct concept in a quadrant system (Figure 2B)

Summary

Introduction

Our research is motivated by an observation in the professional industrial design domain and a research question derived from it: “could concept designers’ creative activities, especially verbalizing novel design concept phrase, be modeled and computationally supported?” The concept design used in industrial design is primarily concerned with developing the aesthetics and semantics of products (Krippendorff, 2005). Krippendorff (2005) called this practice a “design discourse,” describing, “Designers have to justify the aesthetics of massproduced products, products that would ideally be of use to everyone, not individual works of art.” This characterizes the special role industrial designers play, as distinguished from engineering designers, and this role is most clearly observable in the automobile industry (Tovey, 1992). We define the “Design Concept Phrase” (“DCP”) as a compound adjective phrase that conveys product aesthetics and semantics In the industry, such phrases are sometimes called “keywords” (Nagai and Noguchi, 2003); we call them DCP in this research since the term “keywords” is used differently in the natural language processing (NLP) context. Notice that Cartabiano expressed a type of aesthetics and semantics to be avoided, that is, “a laptop on wheels, an Abbreviations: CSC, character space construction; CS, character space; DCP, design concept phrase; CSI, creativity support index; MDS, multidimensional scaling

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Conclusion