Symbol emergence in design

Identifying a standard vocabulary and ontology is viewed as an important task for engineering design. While a number of high-level ontologies have been proposed, these are difficult to ground in terms of actual design instances, and manual definitions of the symbols are often incomplete and difficult to maintain. As an alternative, we propose an ”infant designer” paradigm which abstracts patterns for the ”functionally feasible regions” (FFR) while evaluating many individual configurations in the design space. These learned FFR patterns (which may arise due to minimal levels of functional acceptability, or from optimization) often embody dependency relationships among the design parameters, i.e. the good designs lie along lower-dimensional manifolds in the design parameter space. We show how such manifolds exist in several design situations; each combination of the original design parameters may be thought of as a ”chunk”; the space of these chunks models only the ”good designs”. Next, we show how the patterns defined based on these chunks constitute image schemas, which may be implicit (e.g. the pattern for an FFR), or explicit (where the relationship is observable). These patterns or image schemas are incipient semantic model leading to symbols. We present examples of how such image schemas are arrived at in different design classes, and also demonstrate how some of them may be similar, or even invariant under design change. 1 Efforts towards standardizing the design vocabulary Evolving a standardized vocabulary for design has emerged as an important focus in engineering design with a need for communicating between differing systems and design groups. Possible applications include developing design repositories [Bohm et al., 2005; Nanda et al., 2007], computer assisted conceptual design [Gorti and Sriram, 1996; Campbell et al., 2000; Kurtoglu et al., 2005], [Chakrabarti et al., 2005; Gero and Fujii, 2000], etc. It is clear that vocabularies are structured, that is there are considerable relations between terms. Often, this is viewed as an ontology or as a structured relationship that captures a part of the semantics of these terms. One popular view of the engineering system considers the flow of energy, information, etc, and proceeds downward into detailed design. With its roots in value engineering ideas from the 1940s, these notions were seeded by the analysis in Pahl and Beitz [Pahl and Beitz, 1996] and a particularly influential study by Welch and Dixon [Richard and Dixon, 1994], leading to modern ontological models like the widely used functional basis model [Hirtz et al., 2002] or implementations on ontology tools [Nanda et al., 2007; Szykman et al., 2001]. 1.1 The semantics of design symbols Image schema term Chunk Image schema (Semantic Pole) Design