DESIGN THINKER: an agent facilitated design conversation system for triggering the human creative thought process in architectural design

摘要

The early stage of architectural design is often the most creative period in the design process. It is during this stage that the designer begins to explore ideas for developing concepts and solution conjectures to the design problem. Several researchers have described this as a conversation between the designer and the evolving design, leading to a dynamic and cyclic process that unfurls a range of novel ideas. Generally, a designer’s knowledge and experiences are seen to form the basis for an effective design conversation. The experiential knowledge of the designer, stored in the long term memory, is often hard to recall and can affect the designer’s ability. With this background, the present thesis investigates the hypothesis that ‘an agent-facilitated design conversation system can trigger the designer’s memory for creative ideas and concepts in the early stages of the design process’.Design Thinker, an agent-based design conversation system, has been implemented to prompt the designer in the generation of ideas at the early stages of the design process. The word-based conversation aims to trigger the experiential knowledge of the designer as well as enhance their existing design knowledge by introducing different perspectives and remote associations for their consideration. A design ontological knowledgebase forms the core of the system. The protocol analysis methodology was selected for an empirical study to test the hypothesis. Ten designers, with varying degrees of design experience, participated in the experiment, where the goal was to measure the differences in working with and without Design Thinker.The evaluation of Design Thinker showed that a conversation with the system did indeed motivate a majority of the designers to explore more complex ideas for the design problem. Many of the designers were able to recall their experiences and think in parallel on several design issues. An interesting finding was that Design Thinker proved to be more effective for designers with less work experience. Concluding, Design Thinker would be a useful pedagogic and cognition tool in design activities. Combined with a sketch tool, it could be a strong medium in the design process for design idea generation and expression.