Abstract
A method of artifact fusion is proposed based on the interactions among physical causalities. Imaging some relevant design examples is beneficial for designing artifacts. It involves however some risks to fall into a trap the so-call “mental inatea”. To bring out a special feature of each design example, designers should not be caught up by its structural features e.g. shapes, materials etc. In other words, in the “structural space”, sophisticated solutions are not near to the examples. For supporting functional design without falling into mental inatea, we will propose a method to propose a design candidate which is not focused on structures but on physical causalities. Structural features do not play a main role in this method, they are only referred as the conditions on the validity of each “physical causal relation”. Design examples in the “case-base” of our method are encoded into forms what we call “Functional Diagrams” and “Physical Causal Networks (PCNs)”, which provide purely causal aspects of the design example, and hence they can be processed in various ways. Based on these types of codings, we can develop various methods for supporting functional design processes. Merging PCNs of different design examples is one of the above mentioned method, which can be interpreted as an “artifact fusion” in the level of physical causalities. This process results in a novel artifact which cannot be obtained by merely structural combinations or modifications.
