From Diagrams to Design: Overcoming Knowledge Acquisition Barriers for Case Based Design

One important and often overlooked implication of case based design systems is the acquisition of cases, which are typically hand crafted by system designers. Not only does this make case acquisition difficult and time consuming, but it may also introduce unanticipated biases and limitations into the system. In this paper we demonstrate a case based design system capable of automatically acquiring cases from diagrams, and of using those cases to solve new design challenges. Moreover, we demonstrate that our representation framework enables general teleological reasoning in design that transcends some domain borders, greatly increasing the versatility and usefulness of the cases thus acquired.