A knowledge-based approach towards representation and archiving of aesthetic information for product conceptual design

The representation and archiving of design information play an essential role in product conceptual design by enabling the design teams to reuse existing solutions. However, most existing studies on information management of conceptual design focus mainly on the systematisation of function related design knowledge, while few studies are related to the aesthetic aspect of design information. The challenge lies in acquiring and quantifying the aesthetic information involved in conceptual design activities. It is also difficult to represent and archive the relationships and hierarchies of aesthetic information in conceptual design. In this context, this study proposes a method to facilitate the searching and retrieval of existing design solutions with effective representation and archiving of both functional and aesthetic information in conceptual design. Firstly, to address the challenge of acquiring and quantifying the aesthetic information, Kansei adjectives and aesthetic design principles were applied to quantify the aesthetic design information. Secondly, a model using knowledge-based information representation and an approach for archiving conceptual design information was proposed to represent and archive the aesthetic information in hierarchal relationships. The proposed approach was illustrated by a case study of digital camera design. A system prototype with a domain-driven vocabulary to represent and archive aesthetic information for digital camera design was successfully developed to show the feasibility of the proposed approach