In engineering design, the term “design knowledge” has a variety of definitions, but all share the sentiment that it is a collection of known facts that require effective management in order to produce successful designs. Feng et al. define design knowledge as&nbsp; “the whole of information and data collection” that is continuously expanded and optimized through the process of product design, which includes “design principles and specifications, design standards and methods, and expert experience”. Eventually, design knowledge is used to inform decision making during the design process, which is fundamentally the transformation of information from one form (e.g., design requirements), into another (e.g., a final concept).The management of design knowledge is critical to the success of an organization’s products. As Matsumoto puts it, “commercial pressures have stimulated and fueled the growth of knowledge management. A company’s ability to exploit its collective knowledge can mean the difference between commercial success and failure". In an industrial setting,&nbsp; making knowledge easy to manipulate and search will save time, since engineers spend at least half of their time organizing and examining existing design knowledge, and it will also help avoid reinventing the wheel.&nbsp;In this work, we seek to uncover the underlying relationships between a designer's inquiries, defined as what the designer does not know about their design, and the design features that other designers define when faced with a similar problem. Moreover, we hope to identify any relationships between the types and sources of features with a certain type of inquiry.We hope that by identifying hidden connections between design features and design inquiries, we will support the creation of a design knowledge transfer system. Our aim is to propose solutions to designers' inquiries in the early-stages of design by suggesting solutions that contain similar design features. Identifying similar design features based on the designer's inquiries might be a gate to innovation, however, it remains a challenge.

Linking Design Inquiries to Design Features in Engineering Design

Paper Proceedings: https://asmedigitalcollection.asme.org/IDETC-CIE/IDETC-CIE2021/volume/85369

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