CDR Project

Design Eliza

DesignEliza is loosely based on the Eliza program of classical AI. DesignEliza is an agent that queries users as they work to assist them in reflecting about design and process, enriching design process capture. Designers can benefit greatly from computational support of reflection in the design process. While PENS supports reflection, DesignEliza actively provokes reflection. The two complement each other. Together, information sharing is more succinct, better organized, and more easily understood.

Part of DesignEliza’s approach will be to direct users/designers to information related to their work, encouraging them to look at things from different points of view. For example, if a designer is documenting the performance of a car bumper, DesignEliza will point the designer to other places in that and other electronic sources that reference car bumper performance. The idea is to remove the blinders from a designer in order to keep the design process creative.

In addition, DesignEliza will allow users to initiate searches for information on their own.

The muscle behind this reference search is DedalAI (Dedal with Automated Indexing), a search engine that automatically identifies generic design concepts in text. DedalAI differs from traditional information retrieval in that it relies not only on word frequency to find matches but collocations of words and concepts. DedalAI has demonstrated increases in information retrieval recall of between 15 and 45% over Boolean keyword search.