Trial of design ideation through computational processing of function and user experience descriptions at early stage of design

Abstract

Recently in the field of design, it is becoming more important to generate innovative ideas of "what to create" at early design stage than ideas of "how well to make". Ideation informatics to enhance idea generation by adding systematicity and exhaustiveness of information technology to human intuition should be a prospective approach to the problem. In this research, a ten sentence pattern model is proposed as a computable description of function and user experience (UX) at early design stage as a fundamental technology for ideation informatics by extending the English basic five sentence patterns. An XML format is designed to add semantic information to words, phrases, and sentences described in the ten sentence pattern model by using concept dictionary, i.e., concept identifiers of EDR electronic dictionary and synsets of Japanese WordNet, and software to calculate their semantic similarity is implemented in Python. Then, based on the knowledge of cognitive neuroscience that "human creation does not create something out of nothing, but the memory of the past is the basis of creation", a database of functions and UXs of existing products and services is prepared as an extension of human memory. Using the database, experiments to coming up ideas for solving problems related to the new coronavirus. From the obtained results, the effectiveness and possibility of the proposed method are confirmed.