Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

The goal of the applicant's research is to empower designer's capability by discovering creativity mechanisms and by innovating design tools. In this present research program, we aim to establish an adaptive paradigm, adaptiveCAD, for computer-aided conceptual design systems. This adaptive paradigm can be used as a framework to design various designer-computer coordinated and collaborative conceptual design systems that can effectively support the creative design process. This proposed program is founded on two postulates:***- Postulate 1 (Zeng and Cheng, 1991): Design reasoning follows the recursive logic, where design problems, design knowledge, and design solutions change each other interpedently.***- Postulate 2 (Nguyen and Zeng, 2012): Design creativity is related to designer's mental stress through an inverse U shaped curve, where the mental stress is defined by designer's perceived workload and design capability. ***The adaptiveCAD paradigm will not simply replace designer's work by new functions and technologies in a CAD system; instead, it will allow coordinated and collaborative efforts between designers and CAD systems during a design process. Three research questions will be answered in proposing the effective AdaptiveCAD paradigm:*** Q1: How does a designer design?*** Q2: How does a designer communicate with a CAD system?*** Q3: What constitute an effective AdaptiveCAD paradigm? ***In answering these three questions, we will be focused on the following three short-term research objectives:*** O1: to discover designer's affective and neuro-cognitive mechanism during the conceptual design process*** O2: to propose question-driven conceptual design algorithms for effective designer-CAD communications*** O3: to construct an AdpativeCAD paradigm for a designer to respond adaptively to the designer's affective and cognitive states during conceptual design process***This is one step forward to realize the applicant's goal: discovering creativity mechanisms and creating creative design tools. This proposed research program will bring CAD systems to another level of support for the design and manufacturing industry. The proposed adaptiveCAD paradigm will make CAD systems real Computer-Aided “Design” systems instead of Computer-Aided “Drawing” and/or “Data management” systems.*****