Amaresh Chakrabarti

Amaresh Chakrabarti
Indian Institute of Science Bangalore | IISC · Centre for Product Design and Manufacturing (CPDM)

BE Mechanical Engineering (IIEST Shibpur, India), ME Mechanical Design (IISc Bangalore, India), PhD Engineering Design (University of Cambridge, UK)

About

271
Publications
54,433
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6,631
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Introduction
Design Synthesis and Creativity, Eco-design and Sustainability, Knowledge Engineering and Product Informatics, Sustainable Manufacturing and Industry 4.0, Research Methodology.
Additional affiliations
August 1991 - March 2001
University of Cambridge
Position
  • Research Associate

Publications

Publications (271)
Article
Full-text available
Due to their significant role in creative design ideation, databases of causal ontology-based models for biological and technical systems have been developed. However, creating structured database entries through system models using a causal ontology requires the time and effort of experts. Researchers have worked toward developing methods that can...
Article
Full-text available
Self-instructional media in education has the potential to address educational challenges such as accessibility, flexible and personalised learning, real-time assessment and resource efficiency. The objectives of this study are to (1) develop programmed instructions to teach design thinking concepts and (2) investigate its effects on secondary scho...
Article
A multi-state mechanical device (MSMD) can achieve different functions at different operating states by changing its topological structure and the interaction among its elements. To facilitate conceptual design synthesis of MSMDs, this paper reports the development of a prescriptive model based on past empirical studies, implementing it into a web-...
Preprint
Full-text available
Past research relates design creativity to 'divergent thinking,' i.e., how well the concept space is explored during the early phase of design. Researchers have argued that generating several concepts would increase the chances of producing better design solutions. 'Variety' is one of the parameters by which one can quantify the breadth of a concep...
Preprint
Full-text available
Representation of systems using the SAPPhIRE model of causality can be an inspirational stimulus in design. However, creating a SAPPhIRE model of a technical or a natural system requires sourcing technical knowledge from multiple technical documents regarding how the system works. This research investigates how to generate technical content accurat...
Preprint
Full-text available
Representing systems using the SAPPhIRE causality model is found useful in supporting design-by-analogy. However, creating a SAPPhIRE model of artificial or biological systems is an effort-intensive process that requires human experts to source technical knowledge from multiple technical documents regarding how the system works. This research inves...
Preprint
Full-text available
Due to their significant role in creative design ideation, databases of causal ontology-based models for biological and technical systems were developed. However, creating structured database entries through system models using a causal ontology requires the time and effort of experts. Researchers worked towards developing methods that can automati...
Chapter
Multi-state mechanical devices (MSMD) form a class of mechanical devices that has the capability of changing their topological structure under different operating states. In literature, a gap exists in providing a causal explanation for how a MSMD’s intended function is realized through its structure and behaviour. This work attempts to adapt and i...
Chapter
Functional modelling has great importance in the design process as it is used to analyse, share, and communicate design concepts across various disciplines and assist designers in concept generation, evaluation, and selection. Functional models primarily represent the functionality of a (desired) system, which means, among others, the transformatio...
Chapter
With the increasing adoption of ‘servitization’ under fierce competition and by the influence of Industry 4.0, manufacturers are increasingly moving away from designing technical products as offerings to designing product-service systems (PSS) as offerings. The SAPPhIRE model of causality can represent biological and technical systems and be able t...
Article
Full-text available
Conceptual design synthesis, which focuses on generating solution alternatives, has a significant impact on the cost and quality of the final product. The development of radically new and significantly better solutions requires generation and exploration of a large solution space. Most of the existing literature on conceptual design synthesis of me...
Article
Full-text available
Conceptual design synthesis, which focuses on generating solution alternatives, has a significant impact on the cost and quality of the final product. The development of radically new and significantly better solutions requires the generation and exploration of a large solution space. This work deals with the conceptual design synthesis of multi-st...
Article
Full-text available
Representation of design information using causal ontologies is very effective for creative ideation in product design. Hence researchers created databases with models of engineering and biological systems using causal ontologies. Manually building many models using technical documents requires significant effort by specialists. Researchers worked...
Preprint
Full-text available
With the increasing adoption of 'servitization' under fierce competition and by the influence of Industry 4.0, manufacturers are increasingly moving away from designing technical products as offerings to designing product-service systems (PSS) as offerings. The SAPPhIRE model of causality can represent biological and technical systems and be able t...
Chapter
Structured representations from natural language descriptions of biological and engineered systems are a good source of inspiration in analogical design. Researchers proposed methods for developing knowledge representations from such documents, to make them conducive for use as a source of analogy. Ontology-based representations, such as FBS, SBF,...
Chapter
Quality of medical devices is an important criterion when it comes to addressing health of a human being. Medical devices are manufactured with great effort to reduce risk. However, Micro, Small, Medium Enterprises (MSME)s in manufacturing are unable to afford high-end technology and complex quality control methods. A Smart Incoming Inspection syst...
Article
Environmental concerns, economic benefits, and government legislations are forcing industries to improve their environmental performance. Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is a tool to assess environmental impacts associated with a product, process, or service and is widely accepted in industry and academia. However, challenges to adopting LCA in the ind...
Article
Full-text available
The goal of this paper is to develop and test a gamified design thinking framework, including its pedagogical elements, for supporting various learning objectives for school students. By synthesizing the elements and principles of design, learning and games, the authors propose a framework for a learning tool for school students to fulfil a number...
Article
Full-text available
Research into conceptual design of mechanical systems has been an area of interest for decades. Conceptual design plays a significant role as an early stage of design to produce designs with higher quality by economically exploring a larger solution space. Several attempts been proposed in literature to automate the conceptual design synthesis proc...
Preprint
Full-text available
Structured representations from natural language descriptions of biological and engineered systems are a good source of inspiration in analogical design. Researchers proposed methods for developing knowledge representations from such documents, to make them conducive for use as a source of analogy. Ontology-based representations, such as FBS, SBF,...
Chapter
Literature suggests that people typically understand knowledge by in-duction and produce knowledge by synthesis. This paper revisits ab-duction, a mode of reasoning that has been explored by several re-searchers as a crucial mode of reasoning underlying design synthesis. Our paper expands earlier work on abduction by proposing a more de-tailed mode...
Article
Full-text available
Literature suggests that people typically understand knowledge by induction and produce knowledge by synthesis. This paper revisits the various modes of reasoning – explanatory abduction, innovative abduction, deduction, and induction – that have been proposed by earlier researchers as crucial modes of reasoning underlying the design process. First...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Learning innovation and design process is a necessity of the coming decade and games are a potential tool to do so. This paper proposes an extended taxonomy for categorising innovation and design games. The intent is to understand the essential, the similar and the different categories not only for development, but also for evaluation of innovation...
Conference Paper
In the era of the 4th industrial revolution, new jobs demand that the workforce should have several essential skills such as problem-solving, creativity, critical thinking and innovation skill. School education is the right time to impart these skills in young children who are members of the future workforce. Literature shows that several cognitive...
Conference Paper
The Bologna declaration states that, “successful learning and studying in higher education should involve students in deep learning”. However, a survey of faculty across institutes in Nepal and Bhutan highlights that the undergraduate students in engineering and management lack skills needed to be industry-ready. They face difficulty in getting emp...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Problem-based learning (PBL) has profound implications on the motivations of the student to learn and is known to help develop critical thinking, complex problem-solving, self-learning, collaboration and communication skills, thereby enabling fresh graduates to be industry-ready. However, most institutes of higher education in South Asia offering u...
Chapter
Current manufacturing systems are incorporating digital extensions to meet the emerging trend of ‘smart’ manufacturing techniques. The underlying distinction of Smart Manufacturing Systems (SMS) is the digital network of several elements (machines, tools, auxiliary equipments, building services and people) that constitute these. The purpose of such...
Book
This book presents selected papers from the 1st International Conference on Industry 4.0 and Advanced Manufacturing held at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore and includes deliberations from stakeholders in manufacturing and Industry 4.0 on the nature, needs, challenges, opportunities, problems, and solutions in these transformational areas...
Conference Paper
Literature suggests that people typically understand knowledge by induction and produce knowledge by synthesis. This paper revisits abduction, a mode of reasoning that has been explored by several researchers as a crucial mode of reasoning underlying design synthesis. Our paper expands earlier work on abduction by proposing a more detailed model fo...
Conference Paper
Smart Manufacturing or otherwise Industry 4.0 as known in Europe has been the latest technological trend in all industry domains. The components being cyber-physical system (CPS), Industrial Internet of things (IIoT), Big Data are major key technologies in improving the overall performance of the factory. In this paper, a case study is done to unde...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
This work presents a support that automatically generates explanations of an analogy from a given natural language document describing the analogy. These automatically generated explanations detail the analogy at three levels (levels of comprehensiveness): deep, shallow and surface. These explanations follow a template that is inspired by a common...
Conference Paper
The affordability of high technology inspection systems for Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSME) is a big challenge since, if not implemented, it will affect productivity and quality of the product. A case study has been carried out to understand inspection practices at an MSME in India (at an orthotic footwear company), within its medical de...
Article
We propose to automate the assessment of novelty during the early design stages, where the number of solution alternatives is high and these alternatives are flexible. The novelty of a solution is measured as its distance from a reference product database. The distance is calculated by comparing the solution and a reference at different levels of a...
Article
Design is a decision-making process for which knowledge is a prerequisite. Most decisions are taken at the conceptual stage and have pronounced influence on the final design. The literature, therefore, recommends the incorporation of sustainability criteria, such as environment, at this stage. Difficulty in performing life cycle assessment (LCA) du...
Article
In today's aggressive global market, innovation is key for success and design solutions require not only to achieve competitive edge, but also to address the growing environmental, social, and economic needs of the community at large. Consideration of these three pillars of sustainability makes a design inclusive, and life cycle thinking is found t...
Article
Full-text available
The role of workers in factories of the future is expected to change from labour-intensive to knowledge-intensive activities. Acquisition and formalisation of knowledge is a complex and time-consuming task limiting the performance of manual processes. This paper presents a framework to capture, manage and apply knowledge in a manual assembly proces...
Article
Full-text available
In a smart factory, location-aware functions are an important feature. An asset’s position provides the context for making decisions in the factory. In this study, we have proposed a technique for positioning metal parts using a passive RFID (Radio-frequency identification) system. We applied the fingerprinting method using RSSI (Received Signal St...
Article
We aim to lend insights into “what” constitutes design rationale and “how” to capture these. We restrict the scope of design rationale to the cases of failures observed while testing real engineered systems. We propose a model as an integration of a system hierarchy, a causal chain, and a causality model to cast multiple views of design rationale....
Conference Paper
Design thinking (DT) can be a valuable tool for nurturing problem-solving abilities in school children. The objective of the paper is two-fold. The first is to evaluate the effectiveness of the DT process as a potential tool for open-ended problem-solving for school children; the second is to test the effectiveness of gamification of the DT process...
Article
Knowledge acquisition is a well-acknowledged bottleneck in the building of knowledge-based systems. Documents are a useful source of knowledge from experts. This paper targets the reuse of knowledge from the assembly phase of a product in the design and planning phases. Issues, their causes and the parameters involved are necessary to be acquired f...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
In today's highly competitive market, product success is determined by two critical factors - innovation and sustainability. While innovation looks to rampantly satisfy the consumers' ever growing requirements with creative solutions, sustainability attempts to rationalise the precarious demands of desired requirements on economy, society and envir...
Conference Paper
Decisions with respect to product characteristics and life cycle processes, which in turn determine the product’s environmental footprint, are mostly made during the conceptual design stage. Therefore, it is the ideal stage to support design decision-making with respect to reducing the environmental impact of the solution, as is the aim of environm...
Conference Paper
Design thinking is a process that is used to systematically find goals, generate proposals to satisfy the goals, and develop these until satisfied; the areas of application are intended to be universal. This paper proposes a simplified model of design thinking called ‘IISC’ (Identify-Ideate-Select-Consolidate), a gamified version of the design thin...
Book
This book showcases cutting-edge research papers from the 7th International Conference on Research into Design (ICoRD 2019) – the largest in India in this area – written by eminent researchers from across the world on design processes, technologies, methods and tools, and their impact on innovation, for supporting design for a connected world. The...
Book
This book showcases cutting-edge research papers from the 7th International Conference on Research into Design (ICoRD 2019) – the largest in India in this area – written by eminent researchers from across the world on design processes, technologies, methods and tools, and their impact on innovation, for supporting design for a connected world. The...
Article
The biological domain has the potential to offer a rich source of analogies to solve engineering design problems. However, due to the complexity embedded in biological systems, adding to the lack of structured, detailed, and searchable knowledge bases, engineering designers find it hard to access the knowledge in the biological domain, which theref...
Article
It is well-known that creativity is crucial for sustaining a product against competition. Many factors have been proposed in the literature as indicators of creativity, among which outcome-characteristics-based factors are considered the most reliable; among these, the creativity of an outcome is often indicated by two major factors: novelty and us...
Conference Paper
Analogical design has been a long-standing approach to solve engineering design problems. However, it is still unclear as to how analogues should be presented to engineering design in order to maximize the utility of these. The utility is minimal when analogues are complex and belong to other domain (e.g., biology). Prior work includes the use of a...
Preprint
Full-text available
(NOTE: This is an unpublished manuscript of my research that did not get accepted in any publishing house.) Designers of artificial systems use robust design techniques to mitigate the ill-effects of noise (also known as noise variables). Even though it is known that the maximum attainable level of robustness of a system is determined by its under...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
InDeaTe web-tool addresses the issues of poor incorporation of design methods and tools in design. Initially conceived with a focus on sustainability, it is supported by a comprehensive database of design methods and tools, that are mapped using an ontology developed with ACLODS framework as the basis. This paper discusses the expansion of the onto...
Article
An ergonomic assembly process is safer for operators and is more efficient in quality, time, cost and productivity. An assembly process is carried out in a series of distinct events. Ergonomic assessment of an assembly process therefore involves identification of the distinct events within the process and assessment of difficulty in carrying out ea...
Conference Paper
This article presents a generic model for representing a case of failure in engineered systems. In one view, the model explains how a failure propagates across systems levels (Systemic view). In another view, the model contains a sequence of events that lead to the failure at a particular system level (Sequential view). In yet another view, the mod...
Article
This research aims to understand the significance of biological-analogies in fostering novelty by comparing biological-analogies with other design methods for idea generation. Among other design methods, brainstorming was chosen here as benchmark. Four studies were conducted to compare: (i) the levels of abstraction at which concepts were ideated u...
Article
Product life cycle (PLC) is a series of life cycle phases which a product will go through in its lifetime. There are several issues with the life cycle of a product when looked from the environmental impact perspective. These issues impact resource scarcity, cause adverse effects on the environment and loss of embodied energy as waste. Some of the...
Article
Full-text available
The overall goal of this work is to support creativity of technical products by supporting improvement of novelty of designs at the conceptual stage. In this work, use of analogy as a means of aiding creativity was studied for its influence on novelty—a central aspect of creativity. To study their influence on novelty of designs, analogies were cla...
Article
A variety of models of design and idea generation exist; yet, the exact process of idea generation is still only vaguely understood. In this paper, we propose a model of the idea generation process and make a number of recommendations for its improvement. We study both novice and experienced designers through a series of design experiments, seek pa...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Interactions (i.e. modes of operations through which product development knowledge is generated and externalized in the design process) play a vital role in knowledge processes of product development. Intentional or unintentional changes in interactions could have a significant impact on the design process (impacting e.g. idea generation, costly re...
Conference Paper
For real-time ergonomic applications, it is essential to track body data and perform real-time data analysis, for detecting postural deviations and possible ergonomic difficulties. This paper presents a setup that uses a body tracking system for automated, real-time postural data collection during an assembly task, for use in ergonomic studies. An...
Conference Paper
This work is targeted towards achieving knowledge reuse by acquiring diagnostic knowledge about assembly from documents, and feeding it back for subsequent use in the design/assembly planning stage. Towards this objective, this paper looks at some challenges that have been identified in finding in text causal relations between issues and their caus...
Conference Paper
InDeaTe Tool and Template is a sustainable design support, aimed at imbibing and improving the sustainability considerations in any design. This paper presents a case-study on the ‘design of a product’ as a sustainable solution for the problems faced currently while making Wooden-fibre boards at the WSU on-campus facility, where an array of boards...
Conference Paper
The goal of the conceptual design stage is to specify the solution principle, i.e., the concept; to design an environmentally-benign product, it is imperative that the most environmentally-benign concept is selected. However this selection can occur only upon evaluation of alternative solution-variants with respect to their potential environmental...
Conference Paper
InDeaTe is a Design Tool that aids the designer by empowering ideation through a methodical process of design. This paper presents the evaluation of the tool through a case study on a manufacturing system design problem conducted in University of California, Berkeley. The problem given was to design a ‘smart’ manufacturing line for a lawnmower shaf...
Conference Paper
Designing systems for sustainability involves satisfying diverse requirements spanning not just of the object of design but also of the designer, the context in which design happens and the design process. Taking an engineering design approach emphasizes the object of design as well as the process, albeit neglecting the designer and the context in...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
InDeaTe—Innovation Design Database and Template—is a knowledge-driven, sustainable design process support tool, aimed at improving sustainability considerations in design. It comprises a design process template that guides ‘life cycle thinking’ into design by creating intersections of stages of design with life cycle phases at which design activiti...
Conference Paper
The metrics of creativity in design proposed in literature are broadly process—or outcome-based. Process-based metrics assess creativity using characteristics of the design process. Outcome-based metrics assess creativity using characteristics of the outcomes of the design process. However, the current metrics rarely address the issue of how to use...
Conference Paper
There is a continuous demand for novel and innovative products in the market. In order to develop novel ideas, natural systems are considered to be superior source of inspiration. In order to assist designers in ideation, an analogical design tool called Idea Inspire 3.0 is developed; it is a revised version of Idea-Inspire developed in 2005. The l...
Conference Paper
InDeaTe Tool and Template is a sustainable design support, aimed at imbibing and improving the sustainability considerations in any design. This paper presents a case-study on ‘design of green roof’, a type of green infrastructure, to combat the existing issues of Stormwater Management in Syracuse. The primary objective of the design project is to...
Technical Report
The aim of this research is to capture and structure rationale as past cases of issues and solutions in spacecraft mechanisms. Considering the complexity of the spacecraft as a system, and the issues associated with it, it is sometimes a challenge for a designer to identify relevant knowledge. In addition, the knowledge present in documents is vast...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
InDeaTe is a design tool developed to support designers to innovate using a methodical process. It has a process template and a linked database of methods. This paper discusses the application of InDeaTe tool for redesigning a natural water cooler developed by a grassroots innovator in Gujarat in order to make it more sustainable and successful in...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
InDeaTe is a design tool developed to support designers to innovate using a methodical process. It has a process template and a linked database of methods. This paper discusses the application of InDeaTe tool for redesigning a natural water cooler developed by a grassroots innovator in Gujarat in order to make it more sustainable and successful in...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
The motivation behind this research is to aid designers in retrieving a large number of analogies relevant to the design problem under consideration. The objective of the work reported here is to automatically classify natural-language descriptions of analogies into constructs of SAPPhIRE model of causality – a common causal language that was devel...
Article
Full-text available
We explore an approach to synthesize concepts of a class of sensors, where a quantity is sensed indirectly after nullifying its effect by using negative feedback. These sensors use negative feedback to increase the dynamic range of operation without compromising the sensitivity and resolution. The synthesis technique uses knowledge about existing p...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
InDeaTe Tool and Template is a sustainable design support, aimed at imbibing and improving the sustainability considerations in any design. This paper presents a case-study on ‘design of green roof’ a type of green infrastructure, to combat the existing issues of Stormwater Management in Syracuse, New York. The EPA (Environmental Protection Agency)...
Conference Paper
Design is ubiquitous. And like the term Sustainable Development, it has many meanings and interpretation by different people, however it’s importance, akin to Sustainable Development, is unquestionable and cannot be disregarded. Often times misconstrued as either an ‘action’ or an ‘object’, design is in fact both, its is the process of designing as...
Article
Documents are a useful source of expert knowledge in organizations and can be used to foresee, in an earlier stage of a product's life cycle, potential issues and solutions that might occur in later stages of its life cycle. In this research, these stages are, respectively, design and assembly. Even if these documents are available online, it is ra...
Chapter
Based on the experience of the participants, what guidelines can be formulated for successful transition of design research into practice?
Article
Full-text available
Generating a range of concepts is often a significant challenge for novice designers given their limited design experience and domain knowledge. This article develops a tool to support novice designers in formulating a design strategy for converting existing artifacts or mechanical objects into abstract representations. The app-based tool is aimed...
Article
Full-text available
In this paper, a new model for estimating disassembly effort during early stages of product design is proposed. The model has been developed by integrating two well-known models in the field of product disassembly: Das et al. Disassembly Effort Index (DEI) model and Kroll and Hanft Disassembly Evaluation model. The first one is a multi-factor cost...
Conference Paper
The work reported in the paper is primarily aimed towards building a knowledge base for diagnosis of aircraft assembly process plans. The first step is to identify the presence of an issue in the text. Various existing methods that deal with issues in engineering are studied and their suitability presented. A study of sample documents across domain...