Product Designers get inspired and delighted by an engineering imagery database

Year: 2009
Editor: Clarke, A, Ion, W, McMahon, C and Hogarth, P
Author: Langeveld, Lau; Vergeest, Joris
Section: NEW PEDAGOGY
Page(s): 293-298

Abstract

Design courses in the bachelor and master program deliver all kinds of product information. The product designer can reuse the information for design inspiration. Design Research projects at the TU Delft resulted in an engineering databases for that purpose. We have investigated how visual information can inspire the design students by means of relevant information of past student product designs or product concepts. The retrieval of the visual information should be quick otherwise the database can't be successful. A database called Creasys was developed by different design research projects of student teams. The main problems about inspiration, input, product property and visual presentation of the product information have been researched. Google's Picasa offers also the possibility of a database. Students have put in their product design information in both systems. The distinction between Creasys and Google is hard to describe because the number of product information is relative small. Google has the possibility to show and select the inspired product design information, but with a growing database the looking for information might be difficulty to select. The results however indicate that the product designer gets inspired by using the engineering database.

Keywords: Engineering database, product designs, embodiment design, inspiration