Design precedents to design innovation: Category-based reasoning in problem-solving

Abstract

The findings of this study propose a precedent-based method to employ category-based reasoning to design artefacts for acceptability as well as novelty. This is an effort to dissociate the context dependency of particular design cases grounded in the cultural ecosystem from local decisions into generalized reasonings derived from category members, ranging from unique to fuzzy. The attempt is to reconstruct relevant operational types of design reasoning from preceding vernacular design episodes to infer problem-solving techniques employed by designers. Generative category-based reasoning using transformational analogy to transfer design reasoning from precedents of the same or different categories of the problem at hand is adopted. These are concrete comparisons of vernacular designs invited by experiential juxtapositions that have not achieved an abstract rule-like regularity due to their tacit roots. However, they are guidelines, indicative of both the process and the method employed in category-based reasoning for designerly problem-solving.