A function-based computational method for design concept evaluation

Abstract Concept generation is an indispensable step of innovation design. However, the limited knowledge and design thinking fixation of designers often impede the generation of novel design concepts. Computational tools can be a necessary supplement for designers. They can generate a big number of design concepts based on an existing knowledge base. For filtering these design concepts, this work presents a computational measurement of novelty, feasibility and diversity based on 500,000 granted patents. First, about 1700 functional terms (terminologies) are mapped to high dimensional vectors (100 dimensional space) by word embedding technique. The resulted database is knowledge base-I (KB-I). Then, we adopt circular convolution to convert patents into high dimensional vectors. The resulted database is KB-II. Based on the two knowledge bases, the computational definitions of novelty, feasibility and diversity are developed. We conduct six experiments based on KB-II, a random dataset and a real product dataset, and the results show that these metrics can be used to roughly filter a big number of design concepts, and then expert-based method can be further used. This work provides a computational framework for measuring the novelty, feasibility and diversity of design concept.

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