Understanding the nature of design
David C. Brown, William P. Birmingham · IEEE Expert · 1997
AI in design includes the modeling of designer activity, the representation of designer knowledge, and the construction of either systems that produce designs or systems that assist designers.1 Through these activities, we hope to gain better insight both into the nature of design processes and representations, and into methods for developing systems to support design activities. More generally, these studies contribute to our understanding of intelligent behavior. This area has various names, including AI in Design (AID), Knowledge-Based Design Systems (KBDS), Intelligent CAD (IntCAD or ICAD), and Knowledge Integrated CAD (KIC).2 Areas of related work include concurrent engineering, simultaneous engineering, and concurrent design. Design researchers use a variety of AI techniques, such as constraint satisfaction, search, negotiation, and knowledge representation. Because design is inherently multidisciplinary, researchers often draw on results from fields such as cognitive psychology, decision theory, optimization, language theory, and architecture.3,4 The task of design (as opposed to, say, diagnosis) and the domains in which design is being done (for example, computer design and bridge design) influence how these techniques are used.