{"id":4682,"date":"2026-04-22T09:01:32","date_gmt":"2026-04-22T16:01:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/genemoolee\/?p=4682"},"modified":"2026-04-22T11:32:22","modified_gmt":"2026-04-22T18:32:22","slug":"designing-for-designersa-multimodal-hypergraph-rag-system-to-enhance-automotive-design","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/genemoolee\/2026\/04\/22\/designing-for-designersa-multimodal-hypergraph-rag-system-to-enhance-automotive-design\/","title":{"rendered":"Designing for Designers:\u000bA Multimodal Hypergraph RAG System To Enhance Automotive Design"},"content":{"rendered":"<h4>Zhang, Xiaoke, Angela Kwon, Mi Zhou, <strong><span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\">Gene Moo Lee<\/span>\u00a0<\/strong>\u201cDesigning for Designers:\u000bA Multimodal Hypergraph RAG System to Enhance Automotive Design,<strong>\u201d\u00a0<em>Work-in-progress.<\/em><\/strong><\/h4>\n<ul>\n<li>Industry partner: <a href=\"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/analyticsailab\/projects\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Hyundai Kia Motor&#8217;s Digital Design team<\/a><\/li>\n<li>Presentations: INFORMS (2025)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>The growing adoption of large language models (LLMs) across industries highlights the need for domain-specific systems that leverage an organization\u2019s proprietary knowledge. In the automotive sector, general-purpose LLMs often lack specialized expertise and may produce irrelevant or misleading outputs, hindering vehicle designers\u2019 creative processes. To address these challenges, we partner with Kia Motor, a leading automotive manufacturer in South Korea, to develop a designer-oriented, multimodal hypergraph retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) framework for vehicle concept ideation. Our framework consists of two core components. First, we construct a custom hypergraph knowledge base that captures complex relationships between customer feedback (text modality) and design assets (visual modality). Second, we design an interactive chatbot interface that accepts both free-form text and image inputs, retrieves relevant subgraphs from the knowledge base, and generates contextually grounded responses. We plan to evaluate the prototype through randomized online experiments and user studies involving Kia\u2019s design teams. This work will contribute to design science by proposing a scalable method for multimodal knowledge representation and demonstrating how interactive AI tools can support domain-specific creative exploration.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Zhang, Xiaoke, Angela Kwon, Mi Zhou, Gene Moo Lee\u00a0\u201cDesigning for Designers:\u000bA Multimodal Hypergraph RAG System to Enhance Automotive Design,\u201d\u00a0Work-in-progress. Industry partner: Hyundai Kia Motor&#8217;s Digital Design team Presentations: INFORMS (2025) The growing adoption of large language models (LLMs) across industries highlights the need for domain-specific systems that leverage an organization\u2019s proprietary knowledge. In the automotive [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":51140,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[45231],"tags":[1264,45190,4381970,4381974,4381975,4381950,4381976],"class_list":["post-4682","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-working-papers","tag-ai","tag-industry-collaboration","tag-design-science","tag-hyundai","tag-kia","tag-llm","tag-vehicle-design"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/genemoolee\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4682","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/genemoolee\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/genemoolee\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/genemoolee\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/51140"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/genemoolee\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4682"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/genemoolee\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4682\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4685,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/genemoolee\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4682\/revisions\/4685"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/genemoolee\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4682"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/genemoolee\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4682"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/genemoolee\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4682"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}