Shape Design of Products Based on a Decision Support System

From a historical perspective, two fundamental issues are observed for industrial designers: (1) what is the shape design process within the context of a modern product design process, and (2) how shape design theories, methods, tools and computer aided software can be effectively utilized for creating product shapes. A framework is proposed to resolve the issues by describing the relationships of the product design problems, product design processes, shape design processes, shape design methods and tools with consideration of the functional, ergonomic, emotional and manufacturing requirements. The framework implemented here is a new type of decision support system (DSS) - an object-oriented decision support system to assist the designers in designing product shapes. A scooter case illustrates the usage of the framework and the implementation of DSS. According to the planned design process and design method, a shape grammar is used as knowledge representation and knowledge reasoning method for creating scooter shapes. The functional and ergonomic requirements can be explicitly expressed in the shape grammar. The designer can interactively apply the shape grammar with consideration of emotional and manufacturing requirements. Accordingly, the industrial designers can use a DSS to plan their own shape design processes and utilize the shape design tools, methods, knowledge for their own design problems without practicing the complicated and interdisciplinary knowledge of the shape design for many years.