INTRODUCING DESIGN HEURISTICS FOR FURNITURE DESIGN IN A FURNITURE DESIGN COURSE
Year: 2021
Editor: Grierson, Hilary; Bohemia, Erik; Buck, Lyndon
Author: Das, Supradip; Das, Amarendra Kumar
Series: E&PDE
Institution: Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati, India
Section: Innovation and Creativity in Design and Engineering Education
DOI number: 10.35199/EPDE.2021.22
ISBN: 978-1-912254-14-9
Abstract
Concept generation in the early design phase is a deciding factor in any design innovation process. And the magnitude of the concepts generated in the initial design phase is the measurable criteria for success. Experienced designers travel through their world of objects, observations, encoded information, collection of prior experiences and externalize multiple concepts through different tools. However, novice designers experience difficulties exploring the problem space and fixate on the concepts with the initial features. Researchers suggested many formal tools or methods for concept generation in the early phases of design to overcome these issues. Many of these are difficult to use by novice designers and many of these are very generic to product design. This paper discusses a concept generation tool for novice furniture designers ‘Design Heuristics for Furniture Design’ (DHfFD) with special emphasis on the chair, which has been developed from the study and analysis of award-winning furniture chair and published compendium of well-known, successful designs. To understand how the DHfFD cards are perceived by the novice designers in use, the tool was introduced in a furniture design course and a qualitative study was performed with novice design students at the Department of Design, IIT Guwahati. The study shows that the Design Heuristics for Furniture Design tool helps to generate diverse concepts within a short duration of time. This research integrates design tools and cognition in design accordingly, it recommends using ‘Design Heuristics for Furniture Design’ (DHfFD) in a furniture design course.
Keywords: Design Heuristics for Furniture Design, Tool for concept generation, Furniture Design