Integrating Case-Based and Model-Based Reasoning: A Computational Model of Design Problem Solving

My Ph.D. dissertation (Goel 1989) presents a computational model of experience-based design. It first reviews the core issues in experience-based design, for example, (1) the content of a design experience (or case), (2) the internal organization of design cases, (3) the language for indexing the cases, (4) the mechanism for retrieving a case relevant to a given design task, (5) the mechanism for adapting a retrieved design to satisfy the constraints of the design task, (6) the mechanism for evaluating a design against the specification of the design task, (7) the mechanism for redesigning a failed design, (8) the mechanism for acquiring new design knowledge, (9) the mechanism for chunking information about a design into a new case, and (10) the mechanism for storing a new case in memory for potential reuse in the future. It then proposes that decisions about these issues might lie in the designer's comprehension of the designs of artifacts he/she has encountered in the past, that is, in his/her mental models of how the designs achieve the functions and satisfy the constraints of the artifacts.