Creative Designer: What & how?

Engineering design is a kind of human activity that makes use of many different knowledge sources. Basically, this may be a well structured, explicit, and domain specific knowledge or tacit, implicit, and experience-based knowledge. Each type of knowledge has its particular role in design, and thus in knowledge-based design support systems. In this report several issues concerning knowledge-based design support systems are reviewed and discussed. The document begins with a brief introduction of a design process and highlights some of its features. The introduction is followed by a brief review of the nature of design. Two important features of design that are relevant from the knowledge-centred point of view are discussed more deeply – creativity and a need for reflection. Later, the implications toward design support are drawn. Section III discusses the knowledge-based support for the design; first it reviews the related research, then introduces knowledge modelling as a technology, and finally gives an overview of knowledge-based design support as a problem of knowledge (re-)use. Further parts of the document present a new approach to the knowledge-based design support based on the common ontologies and analogous reasoning. Section IV gives a brief overview of the proposed approach, followed by Section V presenting preliminary design guidelines and Section VI presenting a scenario of their application. Document concludes with a discussion of issues raised in the text and suggests expected outcomes of the research. Note: This technical report is based on the work in progress, and thus some strands of the research as proposed here, may be further developed, changed, or omitted in the future materials that will refer to this document.