Extracting Design Rationale in Technical Literature to Provide Inspirational Design Stimuli

Abstract Design rationale (DR) explains why the solution is designed the way it is, and can be used to stimulate creativity and facilitate the development of new solutions in the conceptual design phase. DR was mainly captured by recording the tacit knowledge of designers during the design process, which has hindered its application in conceptual design due to its interference with the design. This paper proposes a method for capturing DR from technical literature, providing an intuitively understandable textual stimulus for design ideation. A textual DR ontology, which includes literature, artifact, issue, intention, argument, and other entities along with their relationships, is used as a metamodel to construct the DR knowledge graph (DRKG). The DR vector space (DRVS) model and the DRVS-based method are used for the joint extraction of entities and relations. Sentences and terms extracted from the technical literature are then organized into a DRKG. A prototype design rationale management system was developed based on the methodology. Finally, we carried out experiments to construct the DRKG and apply it to the conceptual design of a police unmanned aerial vehicle for night patrols using patents and journal articles, and the results verified the feasibility of the method.