Help product designers to choose materials that meet all the requirements including inconspicuous ones like sensorial and intangible properties. In addition to this primary goal, another goal was to explore the possibility of improving the users' creativity through the software.

Various studies have found that sensorial properties and intangible properties were very important in the design process. Karanet.al's complete finding included, in order,

P.S Ramalhete et al. has analysed 87 such tools. They found out that, in most of these software, materials are selected with mechanical and physical properties. The information about aesthetics and surface properties were low in the analysed databases. This limits these tools to act as inspiration sources, which is what a designer need. The interface quality of these tools were also found to be low.

Human perception of materials usually depends not just on one user, it depends on the whole society. In short, all the properties below add upto the meaning of the material.

Analogy is a useful approach for solving an unfamiliar new problem. Analogy adapts the solutions or problem solving process to the past problems for the new problem. By analogy, the relations between the new problem and some past experience or knowledge about a particular phenomenon can be found. This experience or knowledge can be placed in the new situation so that the new problem can be better understood or a new plan for solving the problem can be generated.

If designers are provided with possible analogies, it can lead to an increase in the novelty and variety of ideas being generated. Designers’ level of expertise will affect how well they can come up with ideas. Analogy-making is, however, double-edged: on one hand, it allows experts to consider promising ways for designing a new object; on the other hand, it can restrict the boundaries of the space of research, the extent of design ideas, the range of procedures to be used and thus, reduce creativity.

The number of variables in the second phase considerably increased due to the introduction of design variables. However there was a unwanted side effect to this increase in the design variables introduced. Almost all of them came from supplied cue cards. The number of new design variables were very low.

We conducted interviews with 4 Product designers about 6 projects they were working on. The interview was conducted to understand the process followed by the designers to achieve their design goal. We specifically wanted to understand their design process., where does material selection fall into this process and about their goals and pain points.

• There is no definitive process. The exact process depends on the problem statement at hand.
• Design is coevolutionary. The process is not always linear and it changes as designer goes along the design process.
• It is not always a problem that initiates a design process. A new material or a new manufacturing process or a new product can inspire the designer to create a new product.
• Material selection in some case might not happen, because the stakeholders would have preselected the material and the manufacturing process because of some constraints like cost.
• Aesthetics or Technical properties are given more importance in the conceptual design stage based on the product. In case of aesthetics, usually the designer freestyles with textures and finishes on the conceptual 3d model in the early stage or try different different sketch renders.

As we discovered earlier, analogies can increase ideation effectiveness if done correctly. For this, the software identifies the search term and tries to find similar materials from the properties of commonly used materials, identify the domain and then gives latest news and trends

Intangible properties of a material are user perceptions. Because of these properties solely depending on the user, it is important to know what the user thinks of the desirable intangible properties before design language is set. Karana and Hekkert’s research argues that these perceptions are the dependent on interaction between user and the product which is dependent on sensorial properties of materials. Therefore, we used the tool for ‘meaning driven material selection’ developed by Elvin Karana and her colleagues.

Almost all the designers who were interviewed, use moodboard in their design process to set a design language so that the final product is perceived in a desired way. Material properties contribute largely to the user perceptions. So it is important to incorporate material selection early in the design process.

We could not build this software as it has a lot of data requirements. Collecting those meant we go beyond the scope of this project. As such we could not user test this software completely to measure the increase in the ideation effectiveness.

Boosting creativity using computers is one of my passions. I am currently exploring artificial intelligence to understand the scope of this better. Thank you for reading.