| Activities in the early stage of engineering design typically include the generation of design choices and selection among these design choices. A key notion in design alternative selection is that of preference in which a designer or design team assigns priorities to a set of design choices. However, preferences become more challenging to assign on both a practical and theoretical level when done by a group of individuals. Preferences may also be explicitly obtained via surveys or questionnaires in which designers are asked to rank the choices, rate choice with values, or select a “most-preferred” choice. However, these methods are typically employed at a single point of time; therefore, it may not be practical to use surveys to elicit a team’s preference change and evolution throughout the process.;This research explores the text analysis on the design discussion transcripts and presents a probabilistic approach for implicitly extracting a projection of aggregated preference-related information from the transcripts. The approach in this research graphically represents how likely a choice is to be “most preferred” by a design team over time. For evaluation purpose, two approaches are established for approximating a team’s "most preferred" choice in a probabilistic way from surveys of individual team members. A design selection experiment was conducted to determine possible correlations between the preferential probabilities estimated from the team’s discussion and survey ratings explicitly stated by team members. Results suggest that there are strong correlations between extracted preferential probabilities and team intents that are stated explicitly, and that the proposed methods can provide a quantitative way to understand and represent qualitative design information using a low overhead information extraction method. |
