TRENDS: A Content-Based Information Retrieval System for Designers

Designers cognitive processes formalization and explicitation become a major topic for many scientific communities like design science, cognitive psychology, computer science and artificial intelligence. This growing interest is partly due to a certain pressure coming from the industrial context where the shortening of the development durations and the increasing variability of the offer expected by the consumer lead to a formalization and a digitization of the earliest phases of the design process. In this context, these three research areas tend to develop new models and tools that will help to progressively enable to digitize the early design process: (1) formalization of the cognitive design processes with the extraction of design knowledge, rules and skills (2) translation of design rules into design algorithms and (3) development of software tools to be used by the designers themselves and by other professionals involved in the early collaborative design process. This paper deals with the elaboration of an interactive software which enables to improve the design information process implemented by the designers. TRENDS system is positioned in the core of these evolutions and will be presented in this paper following three parts which are related to the aforementioned research areas.