Concept/basic design plays an important role to produce industrial products coping with diversification of customer's preference. This paper describes digital support systems for the concept/basic design processes which can shorten the lead time of a product and expand designer's ideas. One is a system to automatically generate candidate solutions for the design from concept which is expressed by natural language so called Kansei Words. Second one is a system using mixed reality technology to evaluate designability and operability without making prototypes. And other three systems for supporting design processes are also introduced in outline.

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This paper presents a physics-based model for virtual cloth simulation specifically targeted for CAD applications in the clothing sector. A discrete particlebased model in Newtonian formulation is considered, in which particle grids define the fabric structure. Grid particles interact with each other through forces describing local traction and compression, bending and shear properties depending on the fabric material. Interactions with the surrounding environment are described in terms of external forces, imposed kinematicgeometrical constraints, and collisions with obstacles. Collision detection is based on bounding box hierarchies and region decomposition. The model is implemented in the framework of a 3D graphical environment for virtual garment design, and includes operators for monitoring the whole 3D garment shape definition process, e.g. panel sewing, button/dart insertion, multi-layered fabric composition, and other garment finishings. As applications, male and female cloth shapes simulated on virtual mannequins are shown. Results have been assessed in the frame-work of European and Italian projects for virtual cloth design.

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The paper describes practices for validating ergonomics aspects of interactive devices using the state-of-the-art of virtual prototyping methodologies and technologies. The approach we propose is quite innovative and is based on mixed virtual-real paradigm, where a virtual reality application id augmented with dynamic haptic systems consisting of ad hoc devices that can be programmed and configured for simulating the behavior of specific objects.

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In curve design, controlling macroscopic feature that emerges from the total of shape elements is important. However, trial and error is required in order to control the curved profile to be set reflecting macroscopic feature imaged by designer, because there is no useful method for controlling macroscopic feature in the conventional computer aided design system. We proposed the method for representation of macroscopic feature using curvature integration and multi-resolution representation. This method was applied to shape-generation for the design of automobile side-view. As a result, it was confirmed that the control of macroscopic feature was possible. In the present study, it was shown that the possibility of new design-support in curved profile.

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This paper describes a method to relate form impressions to design parameters; a mapping of image-space to design-space via a neural network solution. A survey designed by the Taguchi method was used to collect data on how altering various design parameters of an automobile affects its image. Principal Component Analysis was performed to extract correlated factors from this data and each sample included in the survey was described in this new space by calculating its factor score. A neural network was constructed and trained with these samples, which allowed a CAD-system, based on this neural network, to automatically generate SD-models corresponding to any form impression presented to it. These results show that it is possible to give a design system a 'sense' of shapes, previously restricted only to the designer.

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