EPDE2021/1138 INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON ENGINEERING AND PRODUCT DESIGN EDUCATION 9-10 SEPTEMBER 2021, VIA DESIGN, VIA UNIVERSITY COLLEGE, HERNING, DENMARK INTRODUCING DESIGN HEURISTICS FOR FURNITURE DESIGN IN A FURNITURE DESIGN COURSE Supradip DAS and Amarendra Kumar DAS Department of Design, Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati ABSTRACT Concept generation in the early design phase is a deciding factor in any design innovation process. And the magnitude of the concepts generated in the initial design phase is the measurable criteria for success. Experienced designers travel through their world of objects, observations, encoded information, and collection of prior experiences to externalize multiple concepts through different tools. However, novice designers experience difficulties exploring the problem space and fixate on the concepts with the initial features. Researchers suggested many formal tools or methods for concept generation in the early phases of design to overcome these issues. Many of these are difficult to use by novice designers and many of these are very generic to product design. This paper discusses a concept generation tool for novice furniture designers ‘Design Heuristics for Furniture Design’ (DHfFD) with special emphasis on t he chair, which has been developed from the study and analysis of award-winning furniture (chair) and published compendium of well-known, successful designs. To understand how the DHfFD cards are perceived by novice designers in use, the tool was introduced in a furniture design course, and a qualitative study was performed with novice design students at the Department of Design, IIT Guwahati. It is observed from the study that the DHfFD tool helps to generate diverse concepts within a short duration of time. This research integrates design tools and cognition in design; accordingly, it recommends using ‘Design Heuristics for Furniture Design’ (DHfFD) in a furniture design course. Keywords: Design Heuristics for Furniture Design, tool for concept generation, furniture design 1 INTRODUCTION Research expounds that frequent unwanted design innovation project dissolution occurs at two points [1]: a) after concept generation and selection process, b) after the market introduction. Therefore, concept generation in the divergent phase of the creative problem-solving process has a decisive influence on the success of any innovation [2] [3], and statistically, the success of the concept generation is significantly co-related to the quantity of the concepts generated [4]. Although researchers proposed several formal methods [5], existing methods have the following issues: 1) unstructured or intuitive [6], 2) difficulty in acquisition [7], 3) difficulty in assessing the concepts [8], 4) lack of validation [9]. An empirical investigation shows that analogical problem solving [10], which is assisted by the solutions from past problems, is an effective tool for scaffolding in design education [11]. Thus, heuristics is a widely accepted tool for concept generation [12], as these are developed based on the principle of analogical problem-solving. The above factor motivated many researchers to develop heuristics for concept generation. Existing heuristics are industrial and product design-oriented and not much support for furniture designers specifically. This research discusses the impact of the tool DHfFD on novice designers. 2 AIM AND OBJECTIVE Previous research related to the effectiveness of the different heuristics observed successful concept generation with heuristics. As the developed tool is from a completely different domain, it is thus necessary to confirm the impact and perception of the developed tool in practice. The research aims to investigate the tool's performance during concept generation and to understand how the tool is perceived. To achieve the desired aim, the tool was introduced in a furniture design course and a qualitative study was performed with novice design students at the Department of Design, IIT Guwahati, India.