A Method to Generate and Evaluate a Creative Design Idea by Focusing on Associative Process

In order to support creative design, we propose an approach composed of two methods for generating creative design ideas. The first method involves generating a candidate for a highly creative design idea by focusing on the notion of “polysemy.” The second involves evaluating the generated candidate by using a virtual network. In this study, we focus on concept generation, specifically, the process of synthesizing two concepts. Furthermore, we use design idea features for representations of the design idea. We attempt to create a set of design idea features that allows the realization of highly creative ideas. For verifying the validity of the first method, we confirmed that the estimated scores of originality of all the generated candidates extrapolated the score of the base design idea.