'Paper sketch' based 'design for Multi-X'

Abstract

Design decision commitments made at the conceptual design stage affect all the other life-phases of a product. Industrial designers are thus under increasing pressures to 'generate' life-oriented conceptual design solutions. This transition to 'Early Design for Multi-X (DF ΣX)' highlights the need for the design research community to develop appropriate DFΣX tools and methods as from early design, during which freehand paper-based sketches are still widely used. This paper presents the development of a tool to handle this early DFX phenomena. In particular, this paper presents the preliminary results of the underlying concept of a Knowledge Intensive Sketching (KiS) framework, which provides designers a list of possible life-cycle consequences inferred from relevant freehand paper-based form sketches.