Prompting Designers to Design

Recent research suggest that engineering designers need assistance to understand what information is relevant for their particular design problem. They require guidance in formulating their queries and also to understand what information is relevant for them. This paper presents an approach to prompt designers with their design queries.

A method that automatically extracts relationships between concepts is described, along with some examples. The method can be implemented as part of knowledge management system and the relationships are extracted form documents that are indexed within the system. The distinctive features of this approach is that all the concepts are elicited from the minds of engineering designers, and the system builds up knowledge as more documents enter the system.

The approach is based on an understanding obtained from a number of empirical studies and also from literature related to: 1) an understanding of how engineering designers search for information and 2) an understanding of the nature of experience in engineering design. Hence these are reviewed in the following sections.