Title: An integrated prototyping and knowledge representation procedure for customer-oriented product design

Authors: Ming-Chyuan Lin, Lung-An Chen

Addresses: Department of Industrial Design, College of Planning and Design, National Cheng Kung University, University Road, Tainan 70101, Taiwan. ' Department of Industrial Design, College of Planning and Design, National Cheng Kung University, University Road, Tainan 70101, Taiwan

Abstract: Design alternative generation is regarded as a key activity in Product Design and Development (PDD) by determining the success of a PDD project. This study presents a design alternative generation procedure that integrates a design prototyping approach and a rule-based system to improve PDD efficiency. This approach aids designers in identifying design parameters and values in the development process and the rule-based system assists designers to link user requirements with design characteristics. In addition, an external computer programming procedure is established to identify variables and develop form representation for the design components. A case study on cup design is used to illustrate and validate the proposed approach. The results demonstrated the potential of the approach in enhancing the efficiency of conventional product design expert systems and providing the designer with a rapid way to generate design alternatives.

Keywords: design prototyping; rule-based systems; interaction matrix; Minkowski metric method; knowledge representation; customer-oriented product design; product development; design alternatives; design parameters; design values; user requirements; design characteristics; form representation; cup design; expert systems; intelligent design; computer graphics.

DOI: 10.1504/IJPD.2005.008007

International Journal of Product Development, 2005 Vol.2 No.4, pp.353 - 370

Published online: 25 Oct 2005 *

Full-text access for editors Full-text access for subscribers Purchase this article Comment on this article