Design descriptions in the development of machine learning based design tools

Applications of machine learning technologies are becoming ubiquitous in many sectors and their impacts, both positive and negative, are widely reported. As a result, there is substantial interest from the engineering community to integrate machine learning technologies into design workflows with a view to improving the performance of the product development process. In essence, machine learning technologies are thought to have the potential to underpin future generations of data-enabled engineering design system that will deliver radical improvements to product development and so organisational performance. In this paper we report learning from experiments where we applied machine learning to two shape-based design challenges: in a given collection of designed shapes, clustering (i) visually similar shapes and (ii) shapes that are likely to be manufactured using the same primary process. Both challenges were identified with our industry partners and are embodied in a design case study. We report early results and conclude with issues for design descriptions that need to be addressed if the full potential of machine learning is to be realised in engineering design.