A framework of design concept generation framework with operations on extensional conceptual space

In the conceptual design phase, generating novel concepts is a cornerstone for producing innovative products. This paper proposes a framework for design concept generation with an extensional conceptual space (ECS). A conceptual space is a geometric space of concepts constructed with concept distance. ECS focuses on the characteristics, i.e., function and physical attribute, each of which is a set of entities that fall under its definition. The concept distant measurement method based on word2vec with Wikipedia corpus is adopted to extract concepts from documents of design cases and to build a concept space. The framework facilitates a designer to explore a concept space containing text and image information with iterative operations, such as function development, and create a new design. This paper demonstrates a case study of chair design to verify the effectiveness of the proposed framework.