Abduction for Creative Design

While abduction is considered crucial for design in general, this paper focuses on the role of abduction to integrate knowledge assuming that creative design can come from innovative combination of existing knowledge. Based on Schurz’s classification of abductive reasoning, the paper identifies that abduction for integrating theories can be performed by a special type of abduction called second order existential abduction. The paper then analyzes refrigerator design cases to understand how knowledge is used and shows that abduction is indeed central to design. It also discusses that knowledge structure is a key concept in abduction for integration.Copyright © 2003 by ASME