Mohammad Hassannezhad, Marco Cantamessa, Francesca Montagna and P. John Clarkson
J. Mech. Des 141(8), 081101; doi: 10.1115/1.4042614

A key challenge in lengthy and labor-intensive design projects is leveraging knowledge and expertise. Tools are needed that reflect the social and technical characteristics of design processes. Such integrated modelling is particularly critical in the early stages of design where information is imprecise and decisions have significant consequence. This paper contributes to the development of Actor-Based Signposting (ABS) - a dynamic method that combines the Activity-based and Agent-based concepts of process modelling. This approach enables individuals to be adaptive in satisfying the local objectives of their own jobs while complying with the global objectives of the rest of the team/entire system. Outcomes from this work are significant because they can be used for predicting the trajectory of a design process by allowing decision-makers to understand what task to do next, whom to assign a task given the availability of resources, and the levels of knowledge and expertise required. Two case studies are presented and results demonstrate a range of insights that could enhance managers’ decision-making capabilities and opportunities for future research are discussed. ​

For the full Research Paper please see ASME's Digital Collection.

Luis A. Vasconcelos; Carlos C. Cardoso; Maria Sääksjärvi; Chih-Chun Chen; Nathan Crilly
J. Mech. Des. 2017; 139(3):031101-031101-13
doi: 10.1115/1.4035540

For the full paper please visit ASME's Digital Collection.

Current design theory lacks a systematic method to identify what designers know that helps them to create innovative products. In the early stages of idea generation, designers may find novel ideas come readily to mind, or may become fixated on their own or existing products. This may limit the ability to consider more, and more varied candidate concepts that may potentially lead to innovation. To aid in idea generation, we sought to identify “design heuristics,” or “rules of thumb,” evident in award-winning designs. In this paper, we demonstrate a content analysis method for discovering heuristics in the designs of innovative products. Our method depends on comparison to a baseline of existing products so that the innovative change can be readily identified. Through an analysis of key features and functional elements in the designs of over 400 award-winning products, forty heuristic principles were extracted. These Design Heuristics are outlined according to their perceived role in changing an existing product concept into a novel design, and examples of other products using the heuristics are provided. To demonstrate the ease of use of these Design Heuristics, we examined outcomes from a classroom study, and found that concepts created using Design Heuristics were rated as more creative and varied. The analysis of changes from existing to innovative products can provide evidence of useful heuristic principles to apply in creating new designs.
 

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Julia M. O'Rourke and Carolyn C. Seepersad
J. Mech. Des 137(9), 091101; doi: 10.1115/1.4030877

​Energy- and materials-efficient designs are highly valued in the context of sustainable product design, but realizing products with significant changes in efficiency is difficult. One means to address this challenge is to use biological analogies during ideation. The use of biological analogies in the design process has been shown to greatly increase the novelty of concepts generated, and many authors in the bioinspired design (BID) community contend that efficiency-related benefits may be conferred as well. However, there is disagreement in the field as to when, how, and why efficiency-related benefits might arise in BIDs. This work explores these issues in-depth. A review of BID literature and an empirical study of BIDs lead to a better understanding of the types of efficiency advantages conferred by BID and set the stage for the development of tools and methods to systematically generate more energy- and materials-efficient design concepts using biological analogies. 

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Defining functions when dissecting a product is an important method to learn how it works.  There are three primary methods for identifying functions in a product.  In this study, we tested the hypothesis that one of the methods is superior to the others.  We tested the three methods in a within-subjects design of experiments to see how each method compared to the others, as measured by the size, shape, and content of each function tree.  We found that there was no dominant method for discovering functions in a dissected device.  This implies that any method is appropriate for understanding how a device works. Additionally, we found generalized aspects of creating function diagrams that are difficult for novice designers.

Authors: Benjamin T. Ciavola, Chunlong Wu and John K. Gershenson
J. Mech. Des. 137(5), 051101 (May 01, 2015); doi: 10.1115/1.4029519

This paper seeks to reconcile and integrate the use of the function- and affordance-based design concepts. By embedding function-based design processes within a use-centric, affordance-based approach, designers can more fully capture the ‘fuzzy’ contextual information that is critical in the early stages of design while still using the powerful design tools with which they are accustomed.

In reconciling the two methods, the paper demonstrates that functions are best used to describe the intended behaviors of large or complex systems, and that function-based design methods can be used to decompose these systems until direct solution is feasible. Affordances are best used to describe what users must be able to do with the functional systems, and show how these descriptions can be organized using action-theoretic models of goal achievement.

The overlap between information used to specify artifact functions and information used to specify affordances occurs at the input/output boundaries of the subsystems found in function-based design methods. In the figure, we can see that the overall state descriptions (shown in red), which enable affordance descriptions (yellow).  These affordance descriptions are then mapped with the function-based device descriptions (green) at the input/output boundaries.  The paper details an automotive design scenario that begins with the user-centric goal of the vehicle (getting to work) and links this goal all the way down to the design specs (accelerator design).

Due to its focus on the end user, affordance-based design provides powerful tools for the early stages of the design process, including concepts and language for requirement generation in terms of goal achievement and user interaction with the objects and features of their environment. Since affordance-based design lacks dedicated tools for concept generation or the design of product architectures, we identified a way to transition to a function-based approach after this initial stage. This process of applying affordances to high-level, intentional concerns before using functions to address the design of lower-level device behaviors can be applied to any stage of the product’s life-cycle by treating other environmental objects and features such as artifact components, tooling, and machinery in the same manner as the artifact itself. 

Authors: Ha-Rok Bae; Hiroaki Ando; Sangjeong Nam; Sangkyum Kim; Christopher Ha
J. Mech. Des.. 137(1), 011001 (2015); doi:10.1115/1.4027849

Authors: Briana Lucero; Vimal K. Viswanathan; Julie S. Linsey; Cameron J. Turner
J. Mech. Des.. 2014; 136(12):121101-121101-11.
doi: 10.1115/1.4028280

This research defines the basis for a new quantitative approach for retrieving useful analogies for innovation based on the relevant performance characteristics of functions. The concept of critical functionality is the idea of identifying only a certain set of pertinent design functions that significantly define the functionality of the product.  A critical function (CF) is a function within a functional model whose performance directly relates to a Key Performance Parameter (KPP) of the system as a whole. These critical functions will enable multiple analogies to be presented to a designer by recognizing similar functionality across distant design domains and incorporating key performance criteria. The ultimate focus of this research project is to create a performance-metric-based analogy library, called the Design Analogy Performance Parameter System (D-APPS). By focusing on a select set of “critical” functions, more design domains can be included in the database facilitating analogy retrieval founded on the qualification of key performance parameters. Such is the case of the beam and bamboo analogy based upon the critical function of maintaining structural stability.

Authors: Mark Fuge, Bud Peters and Alice Agogino 
J. Mech. Des. 136(10), 101103 (2014) (8 pages)doi: 10.1115/1.4028102

Authors: Christine A. Toh; Scarlett R. Miller 
J. Mech. Des. (2014); 136(9):091004-091004-8
doi: 10.1115/1.4027639

Interacting with example products is an essential and widely practiced method in engineering design, yet little information exists on how the representation (pictorial or physical) or interaction a designer has with an example impacts design creativity. This paper reports the results of a controlled study with first year engineering design students developed to investigate the impact of a designer’s interaction with either a 2D pictorial image or a 3D product and the resulting functional focus and creativity of the ideas developed. The results of this study reveal that physical examples have the ability to reduce design novelty and variety. Based on our results, we recommend that designers delay the use of physical examples during the early stages of conceptual design in order to retain a higher level of design creativity. In other words, designers should perform an initial round of brainstorming using pictorial examples before interacting with physical examples of existing products in an effort to broaden the solution space explored. Second, our results show that product dissection encourages more form-based novelty but less functional focus compared to visual inspection. Since designers interact with physical examples frequently, it is crucial that we identify the underlying factors that influence physical interactions impact on design creativity. Finally, our results show that great care should be taken in selecting example designs in the early stages of conceptual design since these interactions can greatly impact design outcomes.