Innovative Production Machines and Systems Conference

As a routine part of the creative process product designers and engineering designers search for and collect inspirational materials. To aid this process, the TRENDS computer-based system aims to improve designers’ access to web-based resources, helping them to find appropriate material, structure it in a way that supports their activities and identify design trends. This is to be achieved through the development of content-based image retrieval facilities that utilise ontological referencing. The goal of this study is the definition, analysis and description of design knowledge, and experimentation which aims to extract the semantic structure used by the designers during the design process. More precisely, this experimentation explores how designers link images and words using low-level and high-level concepts. The findings are used to build a domain ontology which utilises the relations between semantic adjectives and low-level descriptors.