Role of Empirical Studies Understanding and Supporting Engineering Design

Background Study of design and norms for designing dates back 2000 years when Vitruvious first wrote his book on architectural design and prescribed what a designer ought to know and how he/she ought to behave. The perceived need to organize and systematize design started with the first conference on design in 1962. Subsequently, there have been numerous conferences and articles on various aspects of design. Nowadays, there are two distinct schools of design: a prescriptive and a descriptive school, the former being the most prevalent in recent literature. Some of the main concerns raised for some time in the descriptive school of design, can be expressed in the following questions: • What do we know about what design engineers do? • What are their needs? • What information do they use? • How do they go about organizing and retrieving information? • How do they communicate? • How do we go about answering these questions?