Computer-aided form generation for product design

The product form design activities involve a high degree of uncertainty and complexity and are therefore not easily formulated, coded and regularized. Consequently, very few of the computer-aided design approaches presented in the literature can support the conceptual form design tasks typically performed at the preliminary stages of a product's development cycle. To enable designers to perform their design activities more objectively and efficiently, this paper combines the principles of fuzzy set theory, the shape-blending method and genetic algorithms to generate a knowledge-based approach for product form design based upon a database describing the relationships between different product forms and their corresponding perceptual image evaluations.