Emergent design system for enhancing designer's serendipity

This paper describes a basic study on an emergent design system in which serendipity is exerted from interactions between computer and human. The system is proposed to support idea generation in the early design process. In the early design process, which is composed of conceptual and basic design, new and novel ideas of design should be obtained from global solution search because the design objective and conditions are unclear. Therefore, we propose an emergent design system, which enhances designer's serendipity, intended to support idea generation. Serendipity is a natural ability to unexpectedly make interesting or valuable discoveries. This ability is influenced by designer's experiences and knowledge. The possibility of generating new and novel design ideas will increase if we can utilize serendipity. This emergent design system consists of incidental form generation and representation methods. Based on form organizing phenomenon seen in nature, the system can generate diverse forms. These self-organized forms enable designer's serendipity. Moreover, the designer can add or delete elements of the forms like clay modeling. In this process of modification, the designer will have more chance to get inspiration. We perform elementary experiments of this emergent design system with designers. As a result, we confirm both self-organization and representation methods help designers to generate design ideas with characteristic form by inspiring designer's serendipity. Furthermore, the possibility, that the iterations of these functions propose more opportunities to exert designer's serendipity during the computer-human interactions, is indicated