DesignNet: a knowledge graph representation of the conceptual design space

Designers explore design spaces to iteratively define and refine their problem statements and solutions. Yet, designers often get fixated on specific problems, solutions, or trivial surface details without considering the bigger system and the intricate relationships within. Previous works demonstrated how suggesting relevant design examples can help designers break out of fixation. However, current systems recommend design ideas that are decontextualized from other relevant design information. As a result, designers need to manually maintain key relationships and context during the design process. DesignNet is a system to explicitly model the inter-relationships between design information with a knowledge graph. Future work will investigate whether and how a knowledge graph representation and associated graph algorithms can support computational creativity and guide design exploration.