Journal of Integrated Design and Process Science

A major task of engineering is the creation of innovative systems to solve societal problems. Yet many major corporations miss the delivery dates of their newly developed systems and exceed the originally estimated development cost. The likely reason for this is excessive reliance on experience and detailed analyses of sub-systems while ignoring the system-level design issues, especially the coupling of functional requirements (FRs) in the system architecture. A rigorous construction of system architecture and the use of a more formal, theory-based approach have led to systematic development and deployment of large complex systems at minimum cost within the allotted development time. In this paper, three case studies involving large, highly innovative systems are presented to demonstrate the power of rational design and system development: On-Line Electric Vehicle (OLEV), Mobile Harbor (MH), and Mixalloy. The three systems presented in this paper were designed and developed based on axiomatic design theory. OLEV and MH were designed and deployed in two years at KAIST. Mixalloy, a dispersion-hardened Cu/TiB2 alloy, was developed and commercialized in less than four years by MIT-connected colleagues near Boston; we created materials-processing techniques for the alloy, constructed the equipment and the factory for mass production, and sold the product. These three innovative systems were developed and deployed at minimum cost and on time because in each case the entire system was designed based on a firm theoretical foundation for system development and rigorous checking of the system architecture.

The capability of anticipating the main features of future products and related manufacturing processes is more and more a critical asset in industry, due to the innovation-based competition of markets and to the extremely reduced lead time of modern product development cycles. The paper presents a survey of TRIZ, the Theory of Inventive Problem Solving, as a reference methodology to support design activities driven by the forecasted evolution of technical systems. TRIZ postulates, models and tools are described in the scope of technology forecasting and discussed within a more general design science perspective. The discussion highlights strengths and weaknesses of the theory and suggests relevant directions for further research in the field.

Creativity is an important topic in design research. Attempts have been made to develop methods and tools that can help designers become more creative. Yet how and why creativity occurs is still unknown to researchers. In this paper, we propose a theoretical model for creative design. This theoretical model builds on two postulates: 1) design reasoning follows a nonlinear dynamics, which may become chaotic; and 2) there is an inverse U shaped relationship between designer's mental stress and design creativity. In the first postulate, the nonlinear dynamics assumes the form of design governing equation and can be solved by Environment Based Design (EBD). The first postulate implies that design reasoning is sensitive to initial conditions, which are defined by the combination of design problem, design solutions, design knowledge, and other design related information. Since the major components in initial conditions may evolve simultaneously and are subject to continuous change during the design process, the design process is highly unpredictable. Some of the unpredictable solutions, which could be of high quality and useful, can be deemed creative. From this first postulate, three paths to creative design are derived, which specify how the initial conditions can be changed. The second postulate states that design creativity occurs when a designer is under a medium mental stress. Mental stresses are positively related to the workload associated with a design problem and negatively related to the designer's mental capacity. The workload is related to the complexity of the design problem and the amount of work in the design process whereas the mental capacity is related to the knowledge and skills required by the design process and to the designer's affect when dealing with the stresses arising from uncertainties and unpredictability of the design dynamics. To show how this theoretical model can be used to study design phenomena, an interpretation of the roles of sketching in design is presented.

This paper presents the results of a study designed to compare the processes followed by practitioners of three design methods: the algorithm of inventive problem solving, axiomatic design, and environment-based design. Prior literature has postulated the complementary nature of these design methods, and in some cases, has provided case studies of their mutual application on a design problem. However, prior studies have not focused on the detailed activities used in each method to examine the similarities and differences in the outputs of the activities. In this study, a series of three one-day and three three-day design exercises were conducted simultaneously by three international research groups, each focusing on one method. The objectives of this study were to examine the early stages of the design process that deal with macro activities: problem analysis, problem synthesis, and design evaluation and decision making. Several micro design activities were conducted within these, depending on the design method: clarification of requirements, gathering information on existing technologies, initial conceptualization of an assembly of technologies, the identification of system contradictions/coupling, and the solution of contradictions. The objectives of this comparative study were to establish, from observations of practitioners – rather than from a theoretical point of view – the differences and complementarities between the design methods. The problems presented to designers covered a range of design tasks that spanned multiple disciplines, multiple levels of openendedness/specificity of the task, and various levels of inventiveness required. The comparison showed the complementary nature of the design methods, highlighted their respective strengths, and suggested the outlines of an integrated method based on the main benefit of each.

The early stages of the design process are keys in the development of products and services. Nevertheless, they are marked by multiple constraints imposed on them, such as, most notably, a limited amount of time available for modelling and evaluating ideas and concepts. The present article develops an approach for modelling, and simulating initial design solutions during these critical early stages. The final objective is to minimize the amount of prerequisite knowledge a designer should have on the artefact being designed in order to propose, develop, and evaluate early models. First, the current work analyses the conditions necessary to develop a modelling and comparison environment for early design solutions. This is done through mathematical considerations of the design process. In a second part, the work proposes a modelling and simulation approach and develops the machinery behind it. The approach integrates and maps a series of normalized semantic descriptions of functions, generic engineering components and variables, a set of elementary laws associated with these components, and a set of elementary base units. All these elements are used to refine and guide the modelling process. This process is uses the Vaschy-Buckingham theorem followed by an approximation of the generic law describing the general behaviour of elementary components. This combination leads to an approximated model of the behaviour of the studied artefact. The model is further developed by implementing the behaviour in a system dynamics tool using two basic bricks of the system dynamics language, converters and flows. In a final part, the approach is illustrated through the case study of a beam structure.

Based on formal theories of humor and a computational semantic technology for information and text meaning analysis, computers could be programmed to detect and generate humor and determine the patterns of individual humor preferences both for the joke tellers or posters and for the people that comment on jokes. These patterns do not only reveal information on a person's sensitivities to various spheres of life, which, in turn, aggregated, when necessary, over any number of individuals, can be used for targeted advertising, focused marketing, and possibly political campaigns and definitely for cyber security, but also provide a solid cognitive and emotional foundation for friendlier human computer interaction. The paper introduces the rationale and theory for rigorous study of humor that provides a foundation for the outlined research.