Design Support for Generating Novelty with Rough Sets Theory and Conceptual Hierarchy

Rough set approach has been applied successfully to many studies of product design analysis and design support systems. Essence of the approach is regarded as acquisitions of design knowledge from a decision table, where design attributes of existing products and consumers' impressions build from their outer appearance are contained. This approach helps us design products with the target impression in a systematic way. However, impressions of products designed in the way might be generated in the same cognitive process as ones of existing products. In the sense, impressions of those products might not have any novelty. The paper proposes a systematic approach to design products that have novelty as well as the target impression. It defines a design distance in the attributes space using conceptual hierarchies of attributes values, and explores the space to find designs that satisfy both novelty and the target impression. The approach was applied to glasses design and shown to be effective for design that seeks novelty.