Identification and management of the near-field knowledge of industrial design for innovative product shapes

Abstract

Industrial design is a complex process that contains multifarious product knowledge systems which play different roles at different stages of product development. Based on the research of different theories and methods of knowledge classification, the article proposes a new method which divides industrial design knowledge into knowledge in the field, near-field knowledge, and far-field knowledge, and established a corresponding frame of the design knowledge. In order to differentiate the near-field knowledge which is more innovative in design from considerable knowledge to facilitate an efficient design process, mechanisms of similarity searching are used. If 0.3 < Sw(similarity) < 0.6, then define the case as the near-field product case and the relative knowledge as near-field knowledge. The core knowledge can be retrieved to drive innovative modeling. Furthermore, the process of a laptop design is taken as an example and validated using this method.