Fundamental plot for a designer support environment based on abduction

Abstract

This paper describes a new design support system that supports conceptual or creative design by dynamically integrating knowledge in different design domains. We argue that abduction for integrating theories can be a basic principle to formalize such design processes. Based on this principle, we propose Universal Abduction Studio, a design environment in which designers combine different theories to arrive at better design. In this new approach to computational support of conceptual design, the system should offer various types of abductive reasoning from which designers can select an interesting design method. We also discuss technologies to implement UAS and in this paper we propose to use analogical reasoning as abductive reasoning to discover relationships between knowledge from different sources. We demonstrate that a prototype system can discover a new idea in a design example taken from a real design activity.