Description:

The workshop will be structured around a panel made up of representatives from both academia and industry, who will provide their views on an appropriate DBD topic.

The panelists will be asked to address a set of questions related to the chosen topic. There will also be and open-floor discussion on the topics covered. If you are interested in attending please register through ASME and let one of the organizers know that you are attending the workshop. The organizers can be contacted at:

The topic of the current question for debate is "Meeting Customer Needs in Engineering Design." Three poll topics were posed on the DBD web site and the results of these questions are discussed here. Typically, we have more responses for these online questions, so if you haven't already, cast your vote now.

The first topic focuses on the overall goal of design. Thirty-eight percent of respondents believe customer satisfaction should be the goal of design (a) while forty-four percent believe that profit should be the true goal (b). Nineteen percent of respondents feel there are other goals for design (c).
The second topic addresses the ability to capture the preferences of a group of customers. Only fifteen percent of respondents feel that the preferences of a customer group can be captured by an aggregated value function (a). The majority, fifty-four percent, feel that market share (or demand) is a more appropriate measure of customer preference for a product (b). The remaining respondents, thirty-one percent, believe there is another more appropriate view (c).
The third topic addresses the needs of both producer and customers. Thirty-eight percent of respondents feel that design is a tradeoff between customer and producer needs which can be made through multiattribute utility analysis and modeling of customer and producer preference with separate utility measures (a). Another thirty-eight percent believe that design utility is determined solely on producer preference; there is no tradeoff between customer and producer preferences (b). The remaining twenty-five percent feel there is another view for this topic (c).

In summary, the overall consensus gained from this survey is that meeting customers' needs is important in engineering design. A large percentage of respondents support the view that multiattribute value function cannot be directly used to capture the preference of a group of customers. However, views are divided on how to simultaneously model the customers' needs and the producer's preference. Close to a quarter of the respondents seem to hold views that are different from those we listed.