Special issue: representing functionality in design

Abstract

The goal of this special issue is to bring together the state of knowledge of representing functionality in design. The issue contains seven papers from five different countries. These papers address a variety of tasks including description and elaboration of function requirements, generation, evaluation and explanation of conceptual solutions, and diagnosis of solutions when they do not work as expected. The papers show a variety of approaches to generating concepts such as composition, adaptation, and retrieval of concepts. These approaches are applicable in a wide variety of areas such as mechatronics, mechanisms, architectural design, process design and structural design, and operate at, or encompass a number of abstraction levels.