Evaluation of a context knowledge based tool to support decision making in conceptual design

Selecting design concepts while exploring their solution space makes conceptual design a decision intensive process. Due to the complex nature of conceptual design, decisions taken by designer at the conceptual design stage play an important role in all subsequent phases of product life cycle, the user satisfaction of the product and the environment that the product is used and disposed of. Reviews of existing methodologies reveal that there is a need for designers to have a holistic understanding of and access to total context knowledge of the design problem under consideration to aid their decision making at the conceptual design stage. The design solution space could be explored effectively and an optimal solution could be generated if this knowledge is properly structured and available to use for the designers at the conceptual design stage. A new research approach addresses this problem by proposing, implementing and evaluating a computational framework for supporting decision making at the conceptual design stage using design context knowledge. The evaluation of the implemented tool in this paper shows that the method is effective in proactively supporting the designer's decision making using design context knowledge as a new and holistic approach. The scale up of the approach remains a challenge.