Research And Application Of Domain Task In Automobile Styling Design

Product form design is an innovative activity combined with purpose and logic in design process, which involves form, structure, material and relevant aesthetics, emotion and experience etc. Due to the changeable market, complex design process, and abstract design information, all aspects of design task as well as the relationship between them become more and more complex. As a result, design process becomes the focus of both product design development and Computer-aided Industrial Design.As a key domain of automobile body design and an important sub-field of product form design, automobile styling is a systemic design process characterized by innovation and uncertainty. Because of coexistence of logical thinking and imagery thinking, various concept choices and implicitness of design behavior, automobile styling has become one of the areas that require the most profound experience and expertise. Describing the conceptual process of automobile styling scientifically and constructing domain task model and information framework appropriate to automobile styling designers will stimulate the designers'inspiration, optimize the product design process, and greatly improve the accuracy and efficiency of product development.Supported by the National Basic Research Program (973 Program) and the National Natural Science Foundation of China, based on the logic in design process and the theory of design problem solving, this paper focuses on the product design process and proposes a domain-oriented product form design task model. On the basis of domain task model, aiming at automobile styling process, this paper employs a series of special technologies of task decomposition and modeling, as well as constructing the domain task model in automobile styling design, and applies it to a computer aided styling prototype system.This paper is an interdisciplinary research involving Design, Cognitive Psychology and Computer Science etc. It covers product design process, domain task framework and domain task model in automobile styling, and computer aided design system and its implementation, and is structured with four parts as"Theory Investigation– Framework Modeling–Model Construction– System Application and Evaluation", which compose an integrated scientific research process.Theory Investigation examines theories of product design process and domain-oriented design task. Based on relevant theories in Design, Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence, Psychology and Cognitive Science, this part analyzes product design process and design problem solving, defines product form design task, and proposes a domain-oriented task model for product form design.Framework Modeling focuses on the design process in automobile styling and develops a domain task framework specifically for automobile styling. Based on the domain-oriented task model developed in Theory Investigation, this part employs methods in Experimental Psychology and related design research, analyzes task logic, task aspects and relationship between them, and develops a domain task framework. Domain task framework consists of three layers, which are defined as task structure layer, task information layer and task object layer respectively.Model Construction, through a series of experiments in automobile styling design, develops techniques for decomposing, acquiring and modeling in automobile styling domain task model. Based on the domain task framework developed in Framework Modeling, this part outlines the domain task model by modeling a series of key subtasks including semantic generation subtask, image generation subtask, and visual feature generation subtask. During the phase of semantic generation subtask, linguistic adjective function analysis and Semantic Differentia are adopted to acquire design behavior and semantic adjectives. During the phase of image generation subtask, image board and image case are introduced to acquire implicit design behavior and image information. There are two transitions between semantic task and image task to be completed, namely the qualitative transition from semantic adjective to image board and the quantitative transition from semantic adjective to image case. During the phase of visual concept generation subtask, feature lines are acquired as important visual conceptual information. The relationship between the image information and feature lines is quantified as well.System Application and Evaluation focuses on the application of domain task model and the construction of computer aided design prototype system. Based on the domain task model developed in Model Construction, a computer aided automobile styling prototype system is built up to demonstrate the accuracy and reliability.It is proved by both theoretical and practical experience that a design process based on domain task model can assist designers in structuring the design tasks and generating the design idea, inspire designers with innovation, and be of great reference for research on design process in other areas.