Introducing Design Heuristics for Furniture Design in a Furniture Design Course

Abstract

Concept generation in the early design phase is a deciding factor in any design innovation process. And the magnitude of the concepts generated in the initial design phase is the measurable criteria for success. Experienced designers travel through their world of objects, observations, encoded information, and collection of prior experiences to externalize multiple concepts through different tools. However, novice designers experience difficulties exploring the problem space and fixate on the concepts with the initial features. Researchers suggested many formal tools or methods for concept generation in the early phases of design to overcome these issues. Many of these are difficult to use by novice designers and many of these are very generic to product design. This paper discusses a concept generation tool for novice furniture designers 'Design Heuristics for Furniture Design' (DHfFD) with special emphasis on the chair, which has been developed from the study and analysis of award-winning furniture (chair) and published compendium of well-known, successful designs. To understand how the DHfFD cards are perceived by novice designers in use, the tool was introduced in a furniture design course, and a qualitative study was performed with novice design students at the Department of Design, IIT Guwahati. It is observed from the study that the DHfFD tool helps to generate diverse concepts within a short duration of time. This research integrates design tools and cognition in design; accordingly, it recommends using 'Design Heuristics for Furniture Design' (DHfFD) in a furniture design course.