A Framework of Design Concept Generation Framework with Operations on Extensional Concept Space

Abstract

A concept space is a graphical tool to map keywords and images of design visually onto a metric space. While it stimulates designers’ability of problem finding and ideation, there are open issues toward design concept generation. This paper proposes a framework of design concept generation with an extensional concept space (ECS). ECS is a metric space of the characteristics, i.e., function and physical attribute, each of which is a set of entities that fall under its definition. The concept distant measurement method based on word2vec with Wikipedia corpus is adopted to extract concepts from documents of design cases and to build a concept space. The framework facilitates a designer to explore a concept space that contains the text and image information with iterative operations, such as function development, and create a new design. This paper demonstrates a case study of chair design to verify the effectiveness of the proposed framework.