Understanding Design Concept Identification

Abstract

In the design literature, the term design concept is often used de facto, or with only a brief definition provided. Despite the cursory definition for concept, the design process rests heavily on concepts, e.g., brainstorming and generating multiple design concepts, and subsequently identifying design concepts for concept selection, evaluation and development, etc. Concepts and concept formation are of particular interest in psychology, as concepts play a central role in human cognition. Concepts and concept identification are also of interest in other fields such as archaeology, bioinformatics and education. In this paper, we explore the process of design concept identification and address the issue of identifying design concepts in free-form text. Our exploratory experiment uses text transcripts of verbal concept generation sessions to first investigate agreeability between human concept identifiers. Next, we perform a language analysis on the transcripts to uncover language patterns that may differentiate between text segments containing concepts and text segments not containing concepts. Our results show that humans are adept at identifying and agreeing upon concepts (average agreeability > 0.70), and that there are significant language differences that may distinguish concept segments from non-concept segments (i.e., non-concept segments have significantly more verbs and borderline significantly more self-references than concept segments). In general, automated concept identification may lead to better integration of early conceptual design with more detailed and computable downstream processes, resulting in a unified design workflow.Highly refined example: They've got this em Batavus Buster. Medium refined example:It's like an old bike basket that way like the Wizard of Oz.

Group creativity in the wild: When building on ideas enhances the generation and selection of creative ideas

“…To identify ideas in the transcripts, we follow the procedure described in Chiu and Salustri (2014). One of the authors and a colleague completed the coding of the transcribed video independently and without communicating.…”

“…Not agreed‐upon ideas are ideas identified by only one coder (i.e., the text segment was only highlighted by one coder). Then, following Chiu and Salustri (2014) and Rainone et al (2021), we conservatively calculated the raw percentage agreement as the ratio of the number of agreements to the total number of ideas (i.e., agreements + disagreements). The overall percentage agreement between the two coders was 80% which is substantial and satisfactory for qualitative coding (LeBreton & Senter, 2008).…”

Propósitos y Argumentos en el Proceso de Diseño, El diseño conceptual en torno a la representación formal del producto

“…En general existe una fuerte conexión el lenguaje tales como a) términos, b) palabras, c) adjetivos o c) verbalizaciones con el concepto expresado como una idea general con sentido y capacidad expresiva significante, o con algún artefacto u objeto en particular que sea representado físicamente. Como lo señala Chiu & Salustri (2014) estas conexiones e identificaciones pueden ser breves como una sola palabra, combinaciones de adjetivos y sustantivos, o combinaciones verbales o metáforas y analogías que se identifican para describir conceptos. , identifican tres explicaciones diferentes de conceptos y de sus orientaciones: a) los aspectos técnicos del concepto, es decir de la ingeniería, b) la orientación o aspectos del mercado asociado al diseño de productos y c) la integridad y el valor de ambos entendimientos durante la fase de diseño conceptual.…”