Problem examination for AI methods in product design
This work addresses the gap between AI and product design communities, enabling better integration of AI methods for product designers, though it is incremental in nature.
The paper tackles the difficulty of applying AI to product design due to separate communities and terminology, and proposes a new classification of design problems based on decomposability, inter-dependencies, innovation, and creativity to map AI solutions.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) has significant potential for product design: AI can check technical and non-technical constraints on products, it can support a quick design of new product variants and new AI methods may also support creativity. But currently product design and AI are separate communities fostering different terms and theories. This makes a mapping of AI approaches to product design needs difficult and prevents new solutions. As a solution, this paper first clarifies important terms and concepts for the interdisciplinary domain of AI methods in product design. A key contribution of this paper is a new classification of design problems using the four characteristics decomposability, inter-dependencies, innovation and creativity. Definitions of these concepts are given where they are lacking. Early mappings of these concepts to AI solutions are sketched and verified using design examples. The importance of creativity in product design and a corresponding gap in AI is pointed out for future research.