Concept Generation Process Research Articles

2D LATTICE GENERATION BY COMPUTATIONAL DESIGN METHOD

Designers often face the challenge of getting stuck with rigid and dogmatic ideas, leading to a limited number of design options being produced. While experience and talent can help overcome this, it can still take a significant amount of time and effort. This study proposes a repeatable, dynamic process that transforms all design components into parameters, creates a structural analysis model, and performs an optimization process that integrates design and structural analysis. Thus, by leveraging the power of technology, designers can generate a larger number of high-quality design options quickly and efficiently. The article evaluates the effectiveness of this proposed method in generating 2D lattice design concepts and highlights its ability to improve the quality of the design options generated and simplify the idea and concept generation process. The novelty of this method lies in its ability to create a flexible and dynamic approach to design, enabling designers to move beyond dogmatic ideas and generate a larger number of innovative design options. Another purpose of this article is to explore the potential of computer-aided computational design software in generating new and innovative design concepts.

Supporting Multifunctional Bio-Inspired Design Concept Generation through Case-Based Expandable Domain Integrated Design (xDID) Model

Combining different features inspired by biological systems is necessary to obtain uncommon and unique multifunctional biologically inspired conceptual designs. The Expandable Domain Integrated Design (xDID) model is proposed to facilitate the multifunctional concept generation process. The xDID model extends the previously defined Domain Integrated Design (DID) method. The xDID model classifies biological features by their feature characteristics taken from various case-based bio-inspired design examples into their respective geometric designations called domains. The classified biological features are mapped to the respective plant and animal tissues from which they originate. Furthermore, the paper proposes a representation of the functions exhibited by the biological features at the embodiment level as a combination of the integrated structure (multiscale) and the structural strategy associated with the integrated structure. The xDID model is validated using three multifunctional bio-inspired design case studies at the end of the paper.

Iterative transformations for deeper exploration during concept generation

Engineering designers often generate multiple concepts to increase novelty and diversity among early solution candidates. Many past studies have focused on creating new concepts “from scratch;” however, designers at every level become fixated on their initial designs and struggle to generate different ideas. In line with prior work on design transformations, we propose a concept generation process of iterative transformation to create new ideas by intentionally introducing major changes in form, nature, or function to an existing concept. A study of this concept generation process recruited beginning engineering students likely to benefit from an alternative to "blank slate" generation. Working alone in a single test session, students generated an initial concept for a presented design problem. Then, they were instructed to generate another concept by transforming their initial design into a new concept and repeated this process to create three more concepts. In a second design round, students were asked to consider 7 Design Heuristics strategies to prompt possible transformations for their concepts. Beginning again with their initial concept, each student generated another set of four transformed concepts using iterative transformation. The analysis considered 60 initial concepts and 476 transformed concepts with and without the use of Design Heuristics. We created Design Transformation Diagrams to observe links (sequential, non-sequential, or both) between transformed concepts within each set of four concepts and between the two sets. Three patterns across the diagrams were identified: Fully Sequential, Sequential with Deviation, and Divergent. When aided by Design Heuristics, transformations included more non-sequential links, suggesting synthesis, refinement, and extension of other prior concepts, and resulting in more varied and distinct transformations. This iterative transformation process may support more diversity in concepts generated through a deeper exploration of related concepts without requiring an escape from the influence of existing concepts. Concept generation strategies like Design Heuristics may support engineering students as they learn to expand their early exploration of design concepts.

The Application of Interactive Effect Evaluation Model in the Teaching of College Mathematics Courses

Mathematics courses in higher education (advanced mathematics, linear algebra, etc.) are characterized by abstract concepts, many easily confused concepts, many nature theorems, and large amount of calculation of many difficulties. In most cases, due to the knowledge level, knowledge structure, and requirements of the teaching process, the traditional mathematics teaching adopts the straight-to-point approach to the introduction of mathematical concepts, and the explanation of property theorems mostly adopts the method of giving the theorems first and then analyzing and proving them for the calculation problems are mostly manual calculation. Educators are mainly concerned with how to organize teaching so that the trainees can acquire more knowledge, while ignoring the subject status of the trainees, and it is often related to the talents of higher education. The training goals are consistent. The traditional mathematics teaching only reflects a function of knowledge inheritance, but lacks the function of knowledge innovation. The lack of concept generation process in teaching makes the abstraction stronger; the lack of case analysis process makes the applicability weaken; and the serious separation of engineering problem solving and computer operation makes it lack of practicability. The current mathematics knowledge and curriculum make students in a passive position in the process of mastering basic knowledge. From the study about the present condition of the math education and the real requirement, the thesis will talk about content, characteristics, and the relationships for the practical education along with interactive teaching process. What is more, the ways of education and online education is able to be presented. At the same time, this paper also obtains the maximum weight value of each teaching quality evaluation index through analytic hierarchy process, introduces the quadratic fuzzy comprehensive calculation method of fuzzy operator, and determines the maximum component of the evaluation level as the final evaluation level according to the most subordinate degree criterion of fuzzy comprehensive evaluation. Especially in the formulation of teaching quality evaluation model in China, the qualitative description is processed quantitatively by the method of fuzzy mathematics and statistics, so that the qualitative index and the quantitative index are organically combined.

The Relation between the Characteristics of Individual and Collaborative Concept Generation

AbstractThe purpose of this study is to investigate the effect of the concept generation process on metacognition, and the relation between individual concept generation characteristics and the nature of collaboration. The results of the experiment revealed that the attitude affects individual concept generation characteristics, the meta-cognition developed and the quality of the concepts generated. In paired concept generation, the awareness and the attitude toward the partner and individual concept generation characteristics affect the nature of both the collaborative process and generated concepts.

INVESTIGATING THE IMPACT OF SCALE IN DESIGN SESSIONS SUPPORTED BY A SPATIAL AUGMENTED REALITY (SAR) TOOL

AbstractSpatial Augmented Reality (SAR) differs from other forms of AR by allowing the projection of digital images onto a model. This allows the AR to be more tangible and for interaction to be more realistic. The scale of the model plays a role in the realism but may be constrained by technical factors. This study attempts to understand the influence scale has on a design session by analysing the concept generation process, the ease of designing and the design behaviour. Understanding how these factors are influenced by the model scale betters the understanding of how SAR can influence design.

Affordability Aspects in the Development of Defence Equipment: Case Studies of Concept Generation in the Defence Industry

ABSTRACT Cost escalation for many complex defence equipment is arguably not sustainable. Customer driven requirements have led to an exponential increase in costs by pushing frontiers of technology to support primarily incremental improvements of traditional equipment concepts. Accordingly, affordability has become a more discussed subject in defence acquisition. This paper addresses the process of generating complex defence equipment concepts. The purpose is to explore how affordability is managed in that process and to identify possible leads to how an unsustainable cost escalation for this type of equipment can be curbed. This is done by studying two cases of concept generation of future combat air equipment systems from a company process perspective. This applied micro perspective on cost escalation showed that none of the concepts generated in these two cases were assessed to curb the cost escalation. Further, the innovation model for the generated concepts, with only one notable exception, was incremental. Nevertheless, the empirical observations from these two cases offer leads on how to potentially foster a more innovative and affordability-oriented concept generation process for future defence equipment, as well as indicating avenues for future research.

Cognitive impact of virtual reality sketching on designers’ concept generation

ABSTRACT This study focuses on identifying the cognitive impact of virtual reality (VR) sketching on the concept generation phase of the design process. For an empirical study to analyse the cognitive influence of VR sketching, we conducted a pilot study for empirical research based on the protocol analysis of designers’ cognitive activities in VR sketching and compared the results with those of traditional sketching. Spatial inspection was a key behavioural factor of VR sketching when considering its high-frequency repetitive and continuous interactions with a designer's representation activities throughout the concept generation process. The cognitive impact of VR sketching revealed the following decisive features: extension of solution space, enhancement of idea transformation and inducement to a holistic design approach for concept generation. These findings provide insight for understanding the cognitive role of advanced digital design tools for future design research.

Understanding the Use of IoT Systems as Architecture Design Stimuli

We are entering a new area of information science that we calling the Internet of Things (IoT). It connects machine with machine, machine with infrastructure and machine with environment, the Internet of everything. More generally, we see IoT as massive amounts of connected concepts that encompass every aspect of our lives. Meanwhile, architects often explore novel design ideas of their knowledge and skills for innovation, even though such ideas rely on their own experience, expertise or intuition, so that it brings the negative effects on creative architecture design. Numerous studies have investigated that concept-synthesizing processes is a key to creative design. However, there is little work specifically on understanding the use of IoT systems as architecture design stimuli. In this paper, we present a model of using IoT systems as design stimuli for architecture concept generation, in this model we abstract IoT systems into ‘input part’, ‘process part’ and ‘output part’. Through a controlled experiment and extended protocol analysis, this research showed that IoT systems stimulate creative architecture design both in design process and design result, in addition, participants often choose the ‘input part’ as design stimuli while ‘input part’ and ‘output part’ both have the promoter action to creativity. Moreover, ‘process part’ prefers to enhance the extension of idea space in concept generation process.

Models for Concept Derivation and Materialization in Design Management

Design is a process that oscillates between visualization and materialization. Within this process, products usually start their lifecycles as abstract concepts that transmute incrementally from raw mental presentations in the inner world of their creators into physical objects in the external world. A framework and associative models for concept management, processing, formation and transformation are introduced and discussed. The framework comprises a set of major phases of concept development from primitive mental images into final materialized products. Concept derivation represents the core of the concept processing framework. Consequently, it is represented as the main nexus between knowledge abstraction and product materialization in design. Nine methods of concept generation and eight elements of concept translation into tangible design products are described and discussed. The concept generation and translation process are illustrated by examples of model implementation.

A Knowledge Extraction and Design Support System for Supporting Industrial and Product Design

Industrial and product design involves a lot of unstructured information for the generation of innovative product design ideas. However, the generation of innovative design concepts is not only time consuming but also heavily relies on the experience of product designers. Most existing systems focus mainly on the technical aspects of realizing product designs, which are inadequate to support concept generation process at the pre-design stage. In this paper, a knowledge extraction and design support system (KEDSS) is presented. The system aims at extracting key design concepts and depicting the trends of these concepts from the massive amount of unstructured design information in the open domain. A summary report, a related concept list, and concept trend graphs are produced based on the inputs of the designers' design ideas. A series of experiments have been conducted to measure the performance of the system. Moreover, the system has been successfully trial implemented as part of a public service platform for modern industrial design of injection molding machinery and equipment.

An Experimental Study on the Characteristics of Concept Space in Design Concept Generation Process

An Experimental Study on the Characteristics of Concept Space in Design Concept Generation Process

An integrated cognitive computing approach for systematic conceptual design

Conceptual design plays an important role in product life cycle, which requires engineers to use sound design theory, cross-disciplinary knowledge, and complex technical support to acquire design concepts. However, the lack of sufficient computational tools makes it difficult for designers to fully explore in the wide design solution spaces. Therefore, this paper proposes an integrated cognitive computing approach to formalize the cognitive activities of conceptual design. A cognitive computing model composed of concept associative memory, concept generation, and decision-making process is established based on the integration of cognitive psychology and engineering design. First of all, the Hopfield neural network is used to acquire similar concept solutions for specific subfunctions from a knowledge base. Then, morphological matrix and genetic algorithm are introduced to produce a set of feasible candidate solutions in the concept generation process. Furthermore, a technique for order preference by similarity to an ideal solution is applied to evaluate the generated concept solutions and obtain the optimal solution automatically. Finally, a case study is given to demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed approach.

Progressive Concept Evaluation Method for Automatically Generated Concept Variants

Conceptual design is one of the most critical and important phases of design process with least computer support system. Conceptual design support tool (CDST) is a conceptual design support system developed to automatically generate concepts for each subfunction in functional structure. The automated concept generation process results in large number of concept variants which require a thorough evaluation process to select the best design. To address this, a progressive concept evaluation technique consisting of absolute comparison, concept screening and weighted decision matrix using analytical hierarchy process (AHP) is proposed to eliminate infeasible concepts at each stage. The software implementation of the proposed method is demonstrated.

Mining Functional Model Graphs to Find Product Design Heuristics With Inclusive Design Illustration

Engineering design heuristics offer the potential to improve the design process and resultant designs. Currently, heuristics are empirically derived by experts. The goal of this paper is to automate the heuristics generation process. Functional modeling, a well-established product representation framework, is applied in this research to abstract the intended functionality of a product. Statistically significant heuristics, extracted from a database of functional models, serve as design suggestions or guidelines for concept generation. The heuristics can further be applied to automate portions of the concept generation process. Prior research efforts in automated concept generation rely heavily on the design repository. The repository needs to be appended for broader categories of design problems, and, at the same time, a tool for quick analysis of the expanded repository is required. An automated heuristic extraction process has the capability to efficiently mine the updated repositories and find new heuristics for design practice. A key objective of this research is to develop design heuristics applicable in the diverse and challenging domain of inclusive design. The research applies graph theory for mathematical representation of the functional model, graph visualization for comprehending graphs, and graph data mining to extract heuristics. The results show that the graphical representation of functional models along with graph visualization allows quick updates to the design repository. In addition, we show that graph data mining has the capability to efficiently search for new design heuristics from the updated repository.

A systematized theory of creative concept generation in design: first-order and high-order concept generation

This paper aims to develop a systematized theory on the thinking process at the ‘very early stage of design.’ Here, ‘very’ is used to exaggerate the beginning of design, which includes the time just prior to or the precise beginning of the so-called conceptual design. First, concept generation is segregated into two phases—the problem-driven phase and the inner sense-driven phase. With regard to theoretical approach, the concept generation process is discussed by comparing metaphor, abduction, and general design theory from the perspective of similarities and dissimilarities. In addition, property mapping, concept blending, and concept integration in thematic relation are explained methodologically. So far, these theories and methods have been discussed independently, and the relations among them have not been clarified. As a result, it was found that the concept generation process could be categorized into two types: first-order concept generation and high-order concept generation. Furthermore, it was shown that high-order concept generation is related to the inner sense-driven phase, whereas first-order concept generation is related to the problem-driven phase.

Concept Generation Process for Patient Transferring Device

In this paper, an attempt has been made to develop concepts for patient transferring tasks. The concept generation process of patient transferring device (PTD), which includes interviews of the customers, interpretation of the needs, organizing the needs into a hierarchy, establishing relative importance of the needs, establishing target specifications, and conceptualization has been discussed in this paper. The authors conducted the interviews of customers at Mobilink NGO, St. John’s Hospital, Bangalore in order to know the needs and wants for the PTD. AHP technique was used for establishing and evaluating relative importance of needs, and based on the importance of the customer needs, concepts were developed through brainstorming.

Constructive simulation of creative concept generation process in design: a research method for difficult-to-observe design-thinking processes

In this study, we conduct a computer simulation in order to capture characteristics or patterns in the concept generation process, which may lead to the generation of a creative design idea. This approach employs a research framework called ‘constructive simulation’, which may be effective for investigating a process that is difficult to observe both internally and externally. The simulation was conducted in four phases. In Phase 1, the virtual concept generation process was constructed on a semantic network. In Phase 2, the relevance of the process was confirmed using network theory. In Phase 3, the simulation was validated using ‘synthetic verification’ which confirms the relevance of the process with another real-life phenomenon, as well as the feasibility of creating more creative design ideas. In Phase 4, the characteristics or patterns in the actual concept generation process were inferred from those of the virtual concept generation process. The results suggest that thinking patterns in which explicit and ‘inexplicit’ concepts are continuously intertwined lead to creative design ideas.

Augmenting the 6-3-5 method with design information

This paper describes a comparative study between the 6-3-5 Method and the ICR Grid. The ICR Grid is an evolved variant of 6-3-5 intended to better integrate information into the concept generation process. Unlike a conventional 6-3-5 process where participants continually sketch concepts, using the ICR Grid (the name derived from its Inform, Create, Reflect activities and structured, grid-like output), participants are additionally required to undertake information search tasks, use specific information items for concept development, and reflect on the merit of concepts as the session progresses. The results indicate that although the quantity of concepts was lower, the use of information had a positive effect in a number of areas, principally the quality and variety of output. Although grounded in the area of product development, this research is applicable to any organisation undertaking idea generation and problem-solving. As well as providing insights into the transference of information to concepts, it holds additional interest for studies on the composition and use of digital libraries.

Innovation and how it can be used to differentiate between payments products

This paper illustrates how innovation can be put to use to differentiate between products in a mature market. It explores the impact of innovation in the various payment ecosystems. In times of compression and compromise, is innovation viable or superfluous? The answer lies within the market. Companies that are able to differentiate themselves are showing strong financial results. Basic questions such as 'How can innovation change the bottom line?', 'Can it be used to mobilise employees?', 'Will it fulfil customers' needs?' and 'What is the role of corporate managers?' are answered. The paper also details an ideation process (the Concept Generation Process) and alternatives for managing innovative projects. Finally, it uses two scenarios to demonstrate how innovation can work within payment realities.