Abduction for Creative Design

Creative design primarily comes from innovative combination of existing knowledge. While abduction is considered crucial for design in general, the paper also focuses on the role of abduction to integrate knowledge. Based on Schurz’s classification of abductive reasoning, the paper identifies that abduction for integrating theories can be performed by a special type of abduction called second order existential abduction. The paper then analyzes refrigerator design cases to understand how knowledge is used and shows that abduction is indeed central to creative design.