Dual-process architecture for reasoning in design innovation problems

This paper presents a dual-process architecture for reasoning in design innovation problems. The architecture includes (i) a uniform mechanism to create various associations among concepts and (ii) a procedure to construct rule-based reasoning flows through abstraction of associated concepts. Three reasoning procedures are discussed based on the architecture. Two case studies show that the dual-process architecture can be utilized for various innovation-related tasks, like searching the solution space search beyond the capabilities of statistical methods and identifying hints to improve the novelty of designs, hence exiting fixation.