Combining Innovation and Perspiration

Louis Steinberg
Department of Computer Science
Rutgers University
New Brunswick, NJ  08903 USA
lou@cs.rutgers.edu

[paper for WORKSHOP ON ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE IN DESIGN at IJCAI-91]

For many design problems, the requirements and/or the available
technology change quickly relative to the design cycle.  As a result
each new artifact designed involves some degree of innovation, and
there is much that the designer must learn in the process of doing the
design.  The Computer Aided Productivity (CAP) Project at Rutgers has
been carrying out a retrospective study of just such a task, the
design of the sailboat, Stars \& Stripes 87, which won the 1987
America's Cup races.  The work is still in progress, but already a
number of interesting observations have been made:

\begin{itemize}
\item Innovation is spurred and guided by perceived opportunity.

\item Innovation often involves borrowing an idea from another context
rather than the creation of something totally new.

\item In innovative design, much of the exploration is to gain information
needed to set up the problem as an optimization/search problem.

\item One of the key questions is which analysis method to use when.

\item A useful guide to design task decomposition is to consider the
different physical processes at work.
\end{itemize}