Panel discussion summary:
This is a summary of the primary points discussed in the 12th Decision-Based Design Workshop Meeting held in Pittsburgh, PA, September 9, 2001.
How do we capture stylish considerations when making value-based engineering design decisions?
How do we capture soft design attributes like environmental and style issues as an engineer in a formal
decision making environment?
How do design methods and approaches stay modern to adapt to how engineering design is going to
occur in the year 2020?
- This requires flexible methods, and methods that address integration and interfaces at their core.
Dynamic markets are a fact of life and our design models and approaches should be able to account for them.
Can we define a more general role of an engineer that covers more than quantifiable attributes that
can be defined by equations? How do preferences affect creative synthesis?
- Engineers can not synthesize anything without preferences. Fundamental customer preferences can guide
creative generation. Comparing the designer's plight to Star Trek, can designers be less like Scotty in the
engine room, who is simply doing whatever Captain Kirk asks and more like Captain Kirk who sees the
big pictureof the enterprise, understands the fundamental needs of the system and customer, and is engaged in
creative synthesis every day? It is important to tackle this at the educational level where engineers should
be exposed to creative synthesis, product marketing, and enterprise organization.
How do you define and handle aggregation in design generation?
- This lies at how general you define the problem. It is impossible to synthesize concepts without knowing
preferences and without knowing the real problem (what you fundamentally want/need).
Should we as engineers and designers strive to reach an expert state in quadrant four where we "don't know we
know" and we just know how to do things correctly but can not really explain how they are done? Or should we be
striving for a state in the third quadrant where we "know we know"? With Decision-Based Design, what state of
understanding are we striving for?
- There is a general consensus that we need much more interaction and collaboration with economists and mathematicians.
Is organizational consciousness simply a sum of individual consciousnesses? How do we synthesize individual
knowledge, learning, and decision models into a collective model of learning in an organization?
- In an organization, there is a need for quadrants three and four, but there is a constant cycling of levels as
individuals transfer their knowledge to others, organizations evolve, and hierarchies of knowledge develop. There
are preference models that already exist, but very few decision models in engineering design that incorporate
preference correctly. Preference models have existed for a long time. However, design engineers need to understand
that in order to be an effective design and decision maker, a broader perspective of engineering must be taken in the
context of product development, global competition, and distributed collaboration. Designers should realize that these
preference models exist and should be used.
How do we involve actual designers who have been designing products for years in our research and application
of the research?
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