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This article aims to expand our knowledge on interdisciplinary design education by focusing on team development, which has remained a less explored aspect of interdisciplinary collaboration so far. An interdisciplinary design studio course, Collaborative Design, for food engineering and industrial design students in higher education provides the research context. The empirical basis of the paper comes from interviews with students on their experiences of interdisciplinary collaboration in the course, and the educator's observation notes. Drawing on these data, this article critically reflects on how and to what extent the teaching materials, methods and strategies incorporated into the course design guided and supported students' transition through the four stages of becoming a performing interdisciplinary team. The article concludes with four suggestions for design educators. First, encountering new ways of thinking, talking and doing that make sense for both disciplines engages students in interdisciplinary collaboration. Second, humour and positive social relations play an important role in team success in all stages of team development. Third, using the first weeks of the course to reveal the disciplinary differences and potential issues that would lead to conflicts through class discussions and warm-up activities facilitates a smooth transition from forming to norming. Fourth, adequate representation of each discipline should be ensured both in the design problem and solution, and among the tutors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The semiotic nature of design and engineering communications has often evaded direct interrogation; specifically the representation of requirements using multiple semiotic modes. This paper explores the semiotic character of requirement representation in the construction project design and engineering process by mobilising a social semiotic analytic framework to reveal how project artefacts (e.g. drawings; digital imagery; physical objects) are multimodal resources that critically affect stakeholder engagement and interpretation. The focused empirical study from a hospital construction project reveals the motivations and effects of multimodal and semiotic communicative choices of different parties (e.g. client; architect; engineer; design consultant) engaged on the same project; the representation (or not) of requirements via various semiotic modes being a social and political process. The contribution of the paper is in revealing the semiotic character of requirement representation and the relevance of semiotic-informed enquiry for an industry continuing to develop new technologies (e.g. virtual reality; BIM – building information modelling) for design and construction work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tertiary programmes in a discipline such as engineering must balance the competing needs of two key stakeholders: the university that designs and delivers the programme, and the professional body that accredits it. Programme and curriculum design in universities is traditionally bottom-up in nature, with courses designed by individual academics, and assembled into cognate programmes. Graduate qualities and accreditation criteria are mapped retrospectively onto the structure. Designing programmes from the top down, driven byuniversity and the accreditation body needs, is a desirable goal. However, without proper support tools, balancing competing needs across multiple courses and year levels is a complex task. Quality Function Deployment (QFD) was created for this precise purpose. Treating the design of a tertiary programme the same as the design of a system suggests that QFD, and the implementation tool known as the House of Quality (HoQ), should be ideally suited to this purpose. The aim of this paper is to show how QFD and the HoQ can be applied to the design of an engineering programme, creating a specification that accurately reflects the voices of stakeholders, and serves as a benchmark for validating that these needs have been met in the implemented design. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose This paper aims to argue about the involvement of additive technologies (ATs) in the prototyping issues of designing. More precisely, it reviews the literature contributions focused on the different perspectives of prototyping activities for design purposes, searching for both available knowledge and research needs concerning the correct exploitation of ATs.Design/methodology/approach A two-step literature review has been performed. In the first step, general information has been retrieved about prototyping issues related to design. In the second step, the literature searches were focused on retrieving more detailed information about ATs, concerning each of the main issues identified in the previous step. Extracted information has been analyzed and discussed for understanding the actual coverage of the arguments and for identifying possible research needs.Findings Four generally valid prototyping issues have been identified in the first step of the literature review. For each of them, available information and current lacks have been identified and discussed about the involvement of AT, allowing to extract six different research hints for future works.Originality/value This is the first literature review concerning AT-focused contributions that cover the complex and inter-disciplinary issues characterizing prototyping activities in design contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper seeks to examine and contextualise the role of Blanche Thornycroft within her family business of John I. Thornycroft in the first half of the twentieth century. The role of Blanche in assisting her father and, after his death, the Thornycroft Company in collecting experimental data informed the design of many vessels. Her role in testing Coastal Motor Boats is explored using the archival material discovered during the ARHC funded project 'Business, government and the workplace: John I. Thornycroft & Company Limited, and the Great War'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Access to higher education (HE) has been a persistent concern for governments, practitioners and researchers. Access to HE has been widely studied from scientific perspectives that have focussed on the factors that contribute to the problem; however, authors have highlighted the need for systemic and design perspectives on education systems. The need to connect research with policy remains one of the most challenging issues for education researchers. In view of this gap, this paper argues that engineering thinking and methods represent an opportunity for the design of HE access policies because engineering rationality (distinct from scientific rationalities) matches the concerns and goals of any policymaking attempt. Engineers design artefacts to meet particular goals. These artefacts are artificial systems, tangible or intangible, such as hammers, bridges or whole organizations, which are designed in particular contexts to meet precise goals. Policies for access to HE are good examples of artefacts that seek to fulfil specific needs under concrete constraints inherent to a country or region. More specifically, HE systems are social systems; in other words, they are created and recreated by the interactions and decisions of diverse actors. Hence, to change, redesign or improve such types of systems involves engineering their very interactions that are the outcomes of institutional and human actions. In particular, engineering design requires operational principles. Thus, we propose agency as a fundamental design concept for the improvement of HE systems, which opens new possibilities for a distinct type of policy-making that takes excellent advantage of what engineering can offer, while at the same time expanding on traditional expectations for engineering. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

[Display omitted] • Highlighting the status, inherent barriers, and challenges of multi-material 4D printing. • A strategic research roadmap based on the opportunities and challenges in engineering and interdisciplinary design. • Proposal of a design for 4D printing framework. The combination of scientific advances in additive manufacturing (AM) and smart materials (SMs) has enabled the development of a new interdisciplinary research area: 4D printing. This technology offers – via stimuli-responsive materials – promising transformation capabilities to objects whether at the functional, shape, or property levels. By considering such capabilities, researchers from multiple disciplines have investigated a large spectrum of stimuli-SMs associations with proofs-of-concept built from either commercial or custom 3D printers. Despite the abundant initiatives, 4D printing requires additional developments to meet robust system applications for the industry. The paper aims to highlight the status, inherent barriers, and challenges of 4D printing to be addressed from a product-systems design perspective. It firstly reminds the fundamentals of SMs, processes, stimulus, and AM to which a synthesis of significant research works related to 4D printing highlighting the current status as well as scientific, technical, and organizational limitations is provided. Beyond this comprehensive study, the paper emphasizes opportunities and challenges from multiple perspectives and draws a research roadmap for engineering design and cross-disciplinary design. The outcome of the work tends to structure research efforts for the next decade towards the development of smart products that meet use for humans and the industry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Improving and supporting the process of design knowledge reuse in engineering design can increase productivity, improve the quality of designs, and lead to greater corporate competitive advantage. Whereas internal knowledge reuse from one’s personal experiences is very effective, external knowledge reuse from an external digital or paper archive often fails. Based on a formalization of the internal reuse process from ethnographic studies, a prototype system, CoMem (corporate memory) is presented, which supports the reuse process, particularly the steps of finding and understanding. This paper presents a usability testing framework and methodology for the evaluation of reuse systems such as CoMem. The two pertinent variables are (1) the type of finding task; and (2) the size of the repository. Preliminary results from the evaluation of CoMem are presented as an example of the application of this framework for studying and assessing corporate memory design reuse systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Taguchi method is very effective in improving quality and decreasing cost while increasing the robustness of designs. However, it is an ‘open control system’ that relies on experiments to determine the optimal levels of control factors. The critical information about how the quality characteristic is affected by changes in the control factor is not considered in the experimental design process. This paper proposes a modified Taguchi methodology by introducing the feedback of quality characteristics to improve the robustness of modular product families against changes in customer requirements to efficiently determine the optimal control factors and the corresponding suitable time periods for designing robust product families. The research questions addressed in this paper include: How to efficiently optimize control factors in the design of product families? How to measure the robustness of a product family for meeting current and future needs? How far into the future should designers look in while designing a robust product family? This paper demonstrates the application of our methodology using a simplified example of a vacuum product family to determine the optimal module instances that need to be deployed in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The spectrum of terminology to describe the professional and academic field “design” is manifold. Terms like design, engineering design, product development, and innovation are widely accepted and used. Whereas some of these terms are common in the business area, others are rather used in the engineering field. Based on the terminologies from exponents of the design science as well as other communities, the paper tries to broaden the view on what “design” means. Additionally, the paper highlights the accordance and differences between the terms design, product development and innovation, and attempts to derive implications for organising research practice in such a broader context. The paper should be seen as starting point for a wider discussion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, a mathematical framework for describing a variety of complex and practical design processes is developed. We demonstrate that our model has the desirable quality of representing several, seemingly distinct, approaches as instances of the same framework. In addition, General Design Theory is shown to be a special case of the proposed framework. Using simple examples throughout the paper, we also hint at the potential for the framework to serve as a basis for a descriptive study of design. Various design phenomena such as design failure, identification of design knowledge bottlenecks, and benefits of collaborative design could be understood using the proposed model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Designers of significant works of infrastructure should consider the complexities of climate change and anticipate the potential impacts over the projected lifetime of the infrastructure. This paper addresses how engineers can comprehensively address climate change in design in a balanced manner. It provides a framework for adaptation in engineering design and includes a specific approach towards a balanced whole-of-life assessment of risk, as opposed to a do-nothing approach, or conservatively designing for worst-case scenario impacts that may not be realised for many decades. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose – A whole-systems approach, which seeks to optimize an entire system for multiple benefits, not isolated components for single benefits, is essential to engineering design for radically improved sustainability performance. Based on real-world applications of whole-systems design, the Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI) is developing educational case studies to help engineers expand their whole-systems thinking. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the effectiveness of these case studies in multiple sections of a first-year engineering course. Design/methodology/approach – The comprehension of whole-systems principles by 165 first-year engineering students at Clemson University was evaluated through surveys and open-ended questionnaires, before and after introducing the educational case studies. Findings – The pilot study results show that introducing the case studies improves students' consideration of several essential whole-systems design concepts. The case studies were particularly effective in strengthening student consideration of the clean sheet approach, integrative design, design for multiple benefits, optimization of the entire system, and the possibility of drastic efficiency increases with current technology. Research limitations/implications – This study was conducted at a single institution and with a fairly homogeneous group of students. These factors should be considered when interpreting the implications of the findings for other groups. Originality/value – This preliminary research shows that case study examples like these can help increase consideration of the whole-systems design approach that leads to improved sustainability performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Engineering of complex systems often involves teamwork. The members of an engineering team must work together to identify design requirements, explore design spaces, generate design alternatives, and make both interactive and joint design decisions. Because of the latency of information and the disciplinary differences, it is often a difficult process for the members of a team to reach agreements when needed. Negotiation has been studied as a method for facilitating information exchange, mutual understanding, and joint decision making. An argumentation-based negotiation approach was previously proposed by the authors to support collaborative engineering design. In this paper, we present an experiment study that was conducted to evaluate the impact of this negotiation support approach on the process and the outcome of collaborative design. The results of the experiment show both positive effects and limitations of the approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes an annotation model of digital design representations which aims to provide the design actors with a way to communicate more clearly in asynchronous situations. Our objective is to develop a model that improves design communication through the elicitation of knowledge related to the context of design. We present a case study based on our observations in an industrial vehicle company where we observed and analysed annotation practices during design reviews. The speech act theory is used in order to propose a model based on the concept of locutionary and illocutionary annotation acts, and annotation categories are drawn from cognitive approaches of design. An annotation scenario is then developed on the basis of the case study as an illustration of our model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses the issue of assessing the performance of project risk management (RM) and knowledge management (KM) in engineering design projects. RMPASS, a new analysis method, which is easily applicable by practitioners, is presented. It uses not only subjective assessments but also objective project data in a description and an evaluation model. New RM and KM performance indicators are introduced. In a feasibility study, RMPASS was applied to three aerospace design projects. The results show that once a risk was identified, the RM ‘machinery’ worked well. Risk identification was the greatest challenge in the RM process, which can be supported by KM. Irrespective of avoidable problems (β-problems), a limit for risk identification appeared: 20% of the encountered problems could not have been anticipated in advance in the state-of-the-art aerospace new design projects examined (α-problems). This could be the uncharted ground that the company reclaims in new design projects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

in this paper we report on an in-depth study of engineering design processes. Specifically, we extend our previous research on engineering student design processes to compare the design behavior of students and expert engineers. Nineteen experts from a variety of engineering disciplines and industries each designed a playground in a lab setting, and gave verbal reports of their thoughts during the design task. Measures of their design processes and solution quality were compared to pre-existing data from 26 freshmen and 24 seniors. The experts spent significantly more time on the task overall and in each stage of engineering design, including significantly more time problem scoping. The experts also gathered significantly more information covering more categories. Results support the argument that problem scoping and information gathering are major differences between advanced engineers and students, and important competencies for engineering students to develop. Timeline representations of the expert designers' processes illustrate characteristic distinctions we found and may help students gain insights into their own design processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper a decision support framework is presented for the design of flexible engineering systems. The framework draws on concepts from multi-objective optimization, consumer choice theory, and utility theory. The framework supports the necessary decisions in the design of flexible engineering systems or systems that can change their functionality and embodiment to satisfy multiple performance requirements. The goal of the framework is to determine a design configuration that maximizes corporate utility while setting attribute and budget constraints for the conceptual design phase. The details of the framework are covered and then applied to a simple case study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Due to the increasing complexity of modern engineering systems, availability is more and more emphasized when systems are used. In order to develop availability sound products, this paper presents a supporting method to evaluate the reliability and maintainability of the feasible solution in the early design phase. The evaluation is implemented based on some scaling factors that are determined according to the differences of the involved engineering activities between the feasible solution and an existing system. The engineering activities are constructed from three aspects: the complexity of product itself, the maturity of product in production and the related factors of product in use. Once the scaling factors are decided, the mean time between failure and the mean time to repair of a design are then estimated according to the data in failure and in maintenance of the known system. No sooner than the mean time between failure and the mean time to repair of a design are established, its availability in future use can also be calculated. Subsequently, the information is considered with the total cost estimation of the system for selecting the optimal one among the feasible solutions. Plausibly, the availability sound designs would be more easily achieved as well as the specified availability goal being further obtained by the design trade-off analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Function is the kernel and essence of products. Conceptual design confirms the principle solution that contains the required function. Based on the study of Effects in TRIZ, this paper establishes that the realization of function depends on physical, chemical and geometrical Effects, such that the Effects should be classified by function. From the viewpoint of function, the concepts of Connect Effects and Control Effects are delineated and the model for Effects chains is set up. An example is given to explain the application process of the Effects chains that can obtain the principle solution in conceptual design. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The re-use of previous design knowledge is a potentially important way to improve design efficiency. To do so, both the product under study (product data) and the argumentation leading to it (process data) must be stored throughout the engineering design process. CAD systems do the former very well; the latter has to be developed. The objective of the paper is to contribute to a system able to capture design process rationale and make it available for re-use in the current design project or in further projects. The approach involves extracting elements of argumentation and maintaining connections between arguments, proposed solutions and decision-making contexts. Criteria exchanged between design participants leading to the acceptance or refusal of solutions are key clues to understanding design rationale. A descriptive model of a design process is proposed, based on features capitalising on the rationale of design: a conjecture (an element of a solution proposed for validation), a criterion (an element of evaluation of the proposal) and the interactions between them. Conjectures capture alternatives; criteria provide access to the rationale behind the alternatives. The model was validated by laboratory-based experimentation. A computer-aided tool supporting and analysing criteria–conjecture interactions was developed, focusing on the context of decision-making and currently available information. It comprises a database storing the interactions and five modules to process the data for use in a design context. The raw data in the database are abstracted into knowledge according to the manner in which a design engineer wants to retrieve and use it. This structure is represented in the form of a data-processing prototype. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Towards the realization of plant enterprise engineering environment (PEEE), the construction of the plant model is essential to understand and to manage the plant lifecycle activities. This paper demonstrates a technique to construct a plant model on the basis of object-oriented approach. The plant design model is represented using unified modeling language (UML). The hydrodesulfurization (HDS) plant is used as a case study where the piping and instrumentation diagram (P&ID) of the HDS plant process has been represented as composed of control group units (CGUs) connected to each other via connection points (CPs). An object-oriented modeling tool is used as a repository to construct the plant model. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

One approach to solving multiple response engineering problems is to combine the individual responses into one unifying objective. In tility theory, several characteristics are used to compare and contrast multiple objective techniques. These are risk aversion, marginal rates of substitution, and the relationship of the responses in the combined function. Perhaps unknown to the user, multiple response techniques carry strong assumptions regarding these characteristics. This paper investigates four commonly-used multiple objective techniques and demonstrates that each method contains assumptions about these characteristics which are not intuitively evident to a user. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper develops an efficient computational technique to perform reliability-based optimization of structural design and an inspection schedule for fatigue crack growth. Calculating structural reliability in the presence of inspection is computationally challenging because crack size distribution has to be updated after each inspection to simulate replacement. An exact evaluation using Monte Carlo simulation is time consuming because large sample size is required for estimating accurately a low probability of failure. In this paper a less expensive approximate method is proposed to calculate reliability with inspection, combining Monte Carlo simulation and a first-order reliability method. We use Monte Carlo simulation with a small sample to update the probability distribution of crack sizes after inspection and a first-order reliability method to calculate the failure probability at any time between inspections. The application of this methodology is demonstrated by optimizing structural design and an inspection schedule for minimum life cycle cost of stiffened panels subject to uncertainty in material properties and loading. The effect of the structural design and the inspection schedule on the operational cost and reliability is explored and the cost of structural weight is traded against inspection cost to minimize total cost. Optimization revealed that the use of inspections can be very cost effective for maintaining structural safety. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]