1 Automated Synthesis of Electromechanical Design Configurations from Empirical Analysis of Function to Form Mapping

For an ideal design process, designers envision a configuration of components prior to determining dimensions or sizes of these components. Given the breadth of the component space, the design of any future artifact must be carefully planned to take advantage of the diverse set of possibilities. We conjecture that computational design tools could be developed to help designers navigate the design space in creating configurations from detailed specifications of function. In this research, a methodology is developed that extracts design knowledge from an expanding online library of engineering artifacts in the form of grammar rules. From an initial implementation of 170 rules extracted from seventeen products, we demonstrate a computational process that builds new design configurations by borrowing concepts from how common functions are solved in related designs