Towards a collaborative function-to-form mapping

The technological advances carried out these last years in the field of products development led the researchers to elaborate approaches that reduce the cost and time of product development, enhance the quality of product and help the designers to be more creative. Currently, computer aided systems have concentrated on the capture and representation of geometrical shape and technical information as opposed to provide supports for product design in the earlier stages of design process. The aim of this paper is to present a methodology to aid designers during the first stages of design. The standard models using the STEP standard are proposed in order to ensure co-operative and collaborative works during the first stages of design. Then, we apply our methodology in the case of a bottle design by considering multiple designers’ viewpoints.