The Development of TheDesignExchange.org: Connecting Design Problem Spaces and Design Methods Spaces

The design process plays an imperative role in the quality, cost, success, and future of an engineered product. Design lives in many disciplines including engineering, technology, and the arts, creating a need to assist designers in navigating the design process and choosing the next best steps as they seek a design solution. This project refines the website,  theDesignExchange.org, which will function as a community for design practitioners and as a design methods library A main feature of this website will be a classification mapping between the design problem space and the design method space. To characterize the design problem space, over 300 design problems were collected and key distinguishing characteristics were coded. These characteristics will be refined using a principal component analysis and input from expert designers. To characterize the design method space, an analysis of over 70 design process models was used to develop a top-level ontology of design activities.  Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) and clustering algorithms will be used to group methods into appropriate activities. Design practitioners using theDesignExchange.org will be asked how effective the website was in recommending methods to solve their design problems. Their responses will be used to further refine the design recommendation system.