Abstract
Engineers need to reduce the product design time interval and deal with frequent design changes. For this purpose a design expert system has been developed where a 3D CAD system is used for the visualization of a design layout especially the car audio design. This expert system is based on the configuration design methodology, one of the design methods which emulates the engineering design process, and the parametric design method. The design methods and heuristic knowledge are represented as rules, and design parts are represented as objects with properties. After an inference process, design parameters are extracted and they are used leer the parametric design. This study focused on the shape visualization of product components in the preliminary design phase.