Designing and life cycle engineering—a systematic approach to designing

Abstract

Engineering a system for its whole life cycle involves the phase of designing the system, when all requirements for function, capabilities, life cycle and societal (economic, ergonomic, aesthetic, law conformance, etc.) properties should be established, and as far as possible fulfilled. Designing need not be just an intuitive and idiosyncratic procedure—it can be made more rational.

Design Science has set itself the goal of providing a comprehensive theory. Theories cannot be directly applied. Methods and models derived from the theory can be applied if the relevant parts of the theory are understood (at least at an awareness level) by the applying designer, and the actions and documentation are demanded by design management. The resulting improvement in the process will also render the design process more transparent, and open to review and audit, as demanded by the ISO 9000 series of quality standards. Some contacts with the disciplines of systems engineering and life cycle engineering are indicated. Most formal models of design processes are formulated for novel design problems. They can help to clarify the problem in a more formalized way. Design Science can effectively be applied to novel or redesign problems.

Keywords

designing design process systematic designing

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