Development of Design Heuristics for Furniture Design

Abstract

Innovation in design is positively influenced by the selection of successful concepts from the multiple and varied alternatives generated. Prior research explicated that design heuristics are the prompts, which allows novice designers to generate a number of alternatives and avoid design fixation. However, available design heuristics are industrial and product design specific. There are no heuristics available specific to furniture design. This paper presents the systematic development of design heuristics for furniture design (DHfFD), a concept generation tool for novice furniture designers. The tool has been developed from an analysis of the characteristics of 650 award-winning furniture (chair) designs and published compendium of well-known successful designs. This paper extends the research on the impact of DHfFD use by investigating the effectiveness of the tool through a pilot study. Initial testing has been done successfully with design students in the Department of Design, IIT Guwahati and has been enthusiastically adopted by students to create concepts that are more diverse. This study correlates DHfFD with more number of alternative concepts in furniture design. This research integrates evidence, methods, and perspectives from cognition and design correspondingly provide a pedagogical recommendation to use design heuristics for furniture design to overcome the issues in innovation in furniture design with the novice designers.