Infused Design

Offer Shai, Yoram Reich

Infused design is a revolutionary way of designing, collaborating, and generating creative products. It mobilizes the collective genius of engineers from diverse disciplines.

The term “infused” means the ability to inject knowledge, methods, and solution from one discipline directly, into another domain with minimal overhead.

 

This injection is made possible by abstract graph representations that connect between different disciplines. Currently, the following hierarchy includes the relations we can employ in infused design. 

 

For example, the paths through the hierarchy from “mechanisms” to “electrical systems” allow transforming solution, methods, and knowledge between these two disciplines. Work is continuously underway to extend this hierarchy.

 

 

In the future, infused design will revolutionize design education:

1.         There will be a single theoretical course on Infused design and its mathematical foundation

2.         Many other courses would become applications courses (e.g., electrical circuits, mechanisms, structural mechanics)

 

Related Workshops for Industry:

  • Infused design, creativity, and knowledge: foundation, methods, and products (Shai, Reich, and Rubin)
  • Product concept innovation

Related Presentations (1-2 hours long):

  • Product concept innovation: off the shelf and out of the box

Publications:

1.         O. Shai and Y. Reich, “Infused design: A brief introduction,” in CD-ROM Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Engineering Design (ICED), The Design Society, 2003.

2.         Shai and Y. Reich, “Infused design: I theory,” Research in Engineering Design, 15(2):93-107, 2004a.

3.         Shai and Y. Reich, “Infused design: II practice,” Research in Engineering Design, 15(2):108-121, 2004b.

4.         O, Shai, Y. Reich, and D. Rubin, “Infused creativity: An approach to creative system design,” Ambidextrous, Stanford’s Design School Magazine, Issue 1, Stanford, CA, 2005.

5.         O. Shai, Y. Reich, and D. Rubin, “Infused Creativity: An Approach to Creative System Design,” in Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Design Theory and Methodology (DTM), (New York, NY), ASME, 2005.

6.         O. Shai, Y. Reich, and D. Rubin, “Creative conceptual design: extending the scope by infused design,” Computer-Aided Design, 41(3):117-135, 2009.

7.         O. Shai, Y. Reich, A. Hatchuel, E. Subrahmanian, Creativity theories and scientific discovery: a study of C-K Theory and Infused Design, International Conference on Engineering Design, ICED'09, Stanford, CA, 2009. Outstanding paper award.

8.         O. Shai, Y. Reich, Inventing a new method in statics through knowledge in kinematics, Proceedings of the ASME 2009 International Design Engineering Technical Conferences & Computers and Information in Engineering Conference, IDETC/CIE, San Diego, CA 2009.

9.         Shai, O. Reich, Y., Understanding engineering systems through the engineering knowledge genome: structural genes of systems topologies, international Conference on Engineering Design, ICED'11, Copenhagen, Denmark, 2011.

Related references:

  1. Y. Reich, O. Shai, E. Subrahmanian, A. Hatchuel, P. Le Masson, “The interplay between design and mathematics: Introduction to bootstrapping effects,” Proceedings of the 9th Biennial ASME Conference on Engineering Systems Design and Analysis ESDA2008, Haifa, Israel, 2008.

 

Copyright © 2005-2011 Yoram Reich
Page URL: http://www.eng.tau.ac.il/~yoram/infused.html

Last modified: 21 September 2009 8:26:00 AM