Abstract
In the present competitive situation, it seems insufficient for designers/engineers to just solve or meet obvious and known problems or needs by evolution of existing approaches. The purpose of this research is to propose a method and a computational tool to support designer/engineers' idea generation so that they can find or discern potential but essential problems and needs of people or society and devise creative and innovative design solutions to solve or meet them. As the first step of study on Design Idea Generation Support (DIGS) software tool which actively DIGS up ideas from designer/engineers' mind by stimulating their conscious/subconscious memory with word association suggestion, the experiments of word association by students working on design project (1) by heart, (2) by referring concept relationship type information, and (3) using software with computational concept dictionary. Word association by referring concept relationship type information turned out to be effective to increase variety of association link types when the computational dictionary does not always contain ideally rich vocabulary and association links. Word association using software with computational concept dictionary turned out to be effective to obtain associated word which user cannot think of by heart.
