CAPTURING THE CONCEPTUAL DESIGN PROCESS WITH CONCEPT-CONFIGURATION-EVALUATION TRIPLETS

Design knowledge is a key asset that companies find difficult to capture and access. Since most design is redesign, being able to use prior knowledge effectively is crucial. A record of the design process and the decisions that were made is necessary in order to understand, recreate and modify a design. Not less important is capturing the rationale behind rejected ideas. Various design methods can be used for the conceptual design phase, but most fail to explicitly capture the history and rationale of the process, including the reasons for discarded efforts. This paper demonstrates the need for capturing the design rationale with a textbook example that uses functional decomposition and morphology as the conceptual design method. It then introduces a simple and effective scheme that uses a sequence of triplets of the form concept-configuration-evaluation to describe the desired information. This scheme is based on a conceptual design methodology called parameter analysis, but we show that the proposed means of rationale capture is generally applicable.

[1]  Karl T. Ulrich,et al.  Product Design and Development , 1995 .

[2]  William C. Regli,et al.  A Survey of Design Rationale Systems: Approaches, Representation, Capture and Retrieval , 2000, Engineering with Computers.

[3]  Susan Finger,et al.  DesignWebs: Interactive Organizational Memory , 2009 .

[4]  Johan Malmqvist,et al.  6.5.3 Product Model for Requirements and Design Concept Management: Representing Design Alternatives and Rationale , 2003 .

[5]  Crispin Hales,et al.  Engineering design: a systematic approach , 1989 .

[6]  Stuart Pugh,et al.  Total Design: Integrated Methods for Successful Product Engineering , 1991 .

[7]  Rob H. Bracewell,et al.  DRed and Design Folders: A Way of Capturing, Storing and Passing On Knowledge Generated During Design Projects , 2004, DAC 2004.

[8]  Jintae Lee,et al.  Design Rationale Systems: Understanding the Issues , 1997, IEEE Expert.

[9]  Michael L. Begeman,et al.  gIBIS: a hypertext tool for exploratory policy discussion , 1988, CSCW '88.

[10]  Becky L. Hooey,et al.  Requirements for a Design Rationale Capture Tool to Support NASA's Complex Systems , 2007 .

[11]  Sridhar S. Condoor,et al.  Innovative Conceptual Design: Theory and Application of Parameter Analysis , 2001 .

[12]  Kuntz Werner,et al.  Issues as Elements of Information Systems , 1970 .

[13]  Rob H. Bracewell,et al.  How to evaluate reading and interpretation of differently structured engineering design rationales , 2008, Artificial Intelligence for Engineering Design, Analysis and Manufacturing.

[14]  David G. Ullman,et al.  The Mechanical Design Process , 1992 .

[15]  Rob H. Bracewell,et al.  Supporting design rationale retrieval for design knowledge re-use , 2009 .

[16]  William A. Wulf,et al.  Capturing design rationale in concurrent engineering teams , 1993 .

[17]  Yoram Reich,et al.  Improving the Rationale Capture Capability of QFD , 2000, Engineering with Computers.

[18]  Kevin Otto,et al.  Product Design: Techniques in Reverse Engineering and New Product Development , 2000 .

[19]  Daniel Brissaud,et al.  Design process rationale capture and support by abstraction of criteria , 2003 .

[20]  Mark Klein,et al.  Capturing design rationale in concurrent engineering teams , 1993, Computer.

[21]  Amaresh Chakrabarti,et al.  A design research methodology , 1995 .

[22]  Saeema Ahmed,et al.  Encouraging reuse of design knowledge: a method to index knowledge , 2005 .

[23]  Frank Maurer,et al.  Social Factors Relevant to Capturing Design Decisions , 2007, Second Workshop on Sharing and Reusing Architectural Knowledge - Architecture, Rationale, and Design Intent (SHARK/ADI'07: ICSE Workshops 2007).