Promoting risk communication in early design through linguistic analyses

The concept of function offers significant potential for transforming thinking and reasoning about engineering design as well as providing a common thread for relating together product risk information. This paper focuses specifically on risk data by examining how this information is addressed for a design team conducting early stage design for space missions. A fundamental set of risk elements is proposed based on a linguistic analysis of the risk information needs of the design team. Sample risk statements are then decomposed into a set of key attributes that are used to scrutinize the risk information using three approaches from the pragmatics sub-field of linguistics: (1) Gricean, (2) Relevance Theory, and (3) Functional Analysis. Based on the deficiencies identified in this analysis, a format for the communication of risk data by explicitly accounting for five risk attributes developed in this work is formulated.

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