Inspiring Innovative Design Integration by Collaborative Exploration of Boolean Operations

Computer-Aided Design (CAD) applications provide industrial design communities with various computer-based tools to perform design activities. Innovation is an important requirement in most design tasks. This paper presents a novel approach to inspiring innovative design integration in a horizontal collaboration process. The approach allows individual designers' works to be integrated and multiple design choices to be explored. The technique is currently applied to design work involving Boolean operations-widely available in most CAD operations, where a major technical challenge is to integrate a group of concurrent Boolean operations for design exploration. The approach is particularly helpful to inspire innovation in the integration phases of industrial design tasks such as accessory design, art design, and digital media design.