Explaining Serendipitous Recognition in Design

Creative designers often see solutions to pending design problems in the everyday objects surrounding them. This can often lead to innovation and insight, sometimes revealing new functions and purposes for common design pieces in the process. We are interested in modeling serendipitous recognition of solutions to pending problems in the context of creative mechanical design. This paper characterizes this ability, analyzing observations we have made of it, and placing it in the context of other forms of recognition. We propose a computational model to capture and explore serendipitous recognition which is based on ideas from reconstructive dynamic memory and situation assessment in case-based reasoning.