Seventeenth International Conference on Design Principles & Practices

Abstract

This research discusses Design Heuristics for Furniture Design (DHfFD), a concept generation tool for novice furniture designers with special emphasis on the chair. The tool has been developed from an analysis of the characteristics of 650 award-winning furniture (chair) designs and published compendium of well-known, successful designs. Available Design Heuristics are Industrial and Product Design specific, hence DHfFD has been developed exclusively with an intension to support novice designers to generate concepts in Furniture Design. To understand the effectiveness of the DHfFD tool, it was introduced to the design students at the Department of Design, IIT Guwahati. During the concept generation phase concept quality, quantity and novelty were measured and card utility was analysed. The results demonstrate that there is a significant improvement in the quality, quantity, and novelty of the concepts after the introduction of DHfFD. This research integrates DHfFD tool and cognition in design accordingly, it recommends using ‘Design Heuristics for Furniture Design’ (DHfFD) during concept generation for furniture (chair).