Strategic Design: a Design Method to Manage the Design Framework

In engineering design, it is thought that the designer repeats two steps: to establish the problem framework for generating the design solution and to search for and generate design solutions within the problem framework generated in the former. In this study, we suggest a method of strategic design which changes the problem framework dynamically in the design process. As the first step, in this paper, we verify the efficiency of changing the evaluation criterion of the design solution in the design process through a computer simulation. For the knapsack problem, changing the problem framework dynamically is found to lead us effectively to a solution. Furthermore, it is also suggested that there are specific patterns for changing the problem framework for searching for solutions effectively.