Open Workshop on Decision-Based Design
Newsletter, Number 1
May 1998
Dear DBD Workshop Participants,
We are thrilled to be sending out the first DBD newsletter. We have a few announcements and information to catch you up on the latest activities.
NEW WEBSITE
We have a NEW WEB SITE!! Check out the new look and the new message boards for open discussions on Open Research Issues that most of us are involved in addressing in our research programs. http://www.eng.buffalo.edu/Research/DBD
Please let us know if you want your site and presentations and papers linked to the site. We will gladly do that wherever you think is appropriate.
NEXT MEETING
The next official face-to-face meeting will be held at the upcoming ASME Design Technical Conferences in Atlanta, GA September 12-16. (http://helix.gatech.edu/1998DETC/). We will meet the Saturday (around 9-4 PM) before the conference. We will be sending out details to this soon. Please also check the website for the latest information as well.
The next unofficial meeting will at the Gordon Conference on the Theoretical Foundations for Product Design and Manufacturing at Henniker, New Hampshire June 7-12. Many of us will be attending this and discussing many issues concerning decision making in design and manufacturing throughout the week. Please visit http://www.grc.uri.edu/programs/1998/product.htm for more information.
SPECIAL JOURNAL EDITION
The Journal of Engineering Design & Automation will publish a special issue in 1999 on Decision-Based Design, which will document the Status and Promise of recent developments in DBD. You are invited to submit an article for this special issue. The deadline for the full paper submission is October 30, 1998. Please check http://www.eng.buffalo.edu/Research/DBD/submit.html for more details.
PARTICIPATION
We now have over 90 participants in the workshop, over 1/3 of which have been involved in the face-to-face meetings. We have been expanding to all parts of the world as well, and have participants from over 10 (Canada, Mexico, Bulgaria, China, Japan, Korea, England, Denmark, Germany, Australia, Hong Kong, and USA) countries and companies including Xerox, Ford, and Honourcode, Inc.
EDUCATION UPDATE
We have an active sub-group that attempts to address education issues relating to DBD. Specifically, we are interested in how we teach engineering design currently, how it should be taught, and how to teach decision-making for the design process. Groups have met to discuss specific topics during the last two face-to-face meetings.
At the 4th-Face-to-Face meeting in Sacramento, we held a "Design Problem Solving Session". Each participant came to the session with a plan for applying their most natural design procedure to a standard problem. We concluded that there were similarities among the methods each of us would use to create a satisfactory design. Specifically:
- Allocation of resources is a decision.
- Explicitly or implicitly we all impose a value system on our decision-making process.
- There are decisions that occur (e.g. problem decomposition choices) during the design process that are at a level removed from analysis of solution options. These are decisions that require value-based input.
- An option space must be generated or described, and it takes a process to do this.
At the 5th-Face-to-Face meeting in Monterrey, Mexico, our group focused on tactics for improved engineering education that naturally includes an emphasis on design as decision-making. We discussed the approaches of centering the curriculum around design as opposed to teaching design in the curriculum (as is today’s norm). Three segments that must be defined to develop any curriculum are:
- The skills and knowledge that students are to learn;
- The mastery level required of each student in each skill or knowledge area; and,
- The completion time allowed to achieve the appropriate mastery level.
Translating this to our DBD education objectives, we need to define the above for a course in DBD. What would be most helpful and appropriate as a deliverable from our workshop would be a course module on decision-making skills that can be used during any design course.
To continue progress between meetings, the workshop has engaged two undergraduate students at the University of Maryland through NSF’s REU program. Working under the supervision of Linda Schmidt, these students have each selected a published design problem solved by a method other than Decision-based Design. They will complete the problem again, using DBD approaches, leading to a comparative analysis of results. You can expect to see this work appearing on the Open Workshop website near the end of the Spring, 1998 semester. We are also utilizing undergraduates at University at Buffalo and Clemson through the REU program to investigate and develop education modules and tools to teach design and decision making techniques. When it is all published, we would appreciate your comments and feedback!
DESIGN LEXICON UPDATE
The paper "Let’s Examine the Definitions of the Terms we Use in Engineering Design Research" by Achille Messac (Northeastern) and Wei Chen (Clemson) is posted at the DBD website, under the section "Lexicon". The paper on the web is an invitation to the engineering design research community to examine the current state of the engineering design lexicon. In the paper, the authors pose three general questions: (1) What do you think of the current state of the engineering design lexicon? (2) Does the alleged confounding state of the engineering design lexicon matter? (3) How should the design community address the general state of the engineering design lexicon? The authors illustrate confounding situations where such commonly used terms as criterion and metric are used sometimes as synonyms and sometimes not, potentially leading to material miscommunications. In addition to detailing the outlines of the design lexicon deficiency, they pose important rhetorical questions regarding the potential negative impact of this unclear lexicon. The authors also propose some avenues to a constructive and productive community-wide discussion. You are encouraged to visit this site and submit your views on this issue.
A similar paper was also just accepted in the upcoming ASME Design Theory and Methodology Conference, "The Engineering Design Discipline: Is its Confounding Lexicon Hindering its Evolution?" by Messac and Chen. Many of the participants in this workshop contributed to this paper and will continue to work on its evolution.
All the Best,
Wei Chen - wei.chen@ces.clemson.edu
Kemper Lewis - kelewis@eng.buffalo.edu
Linda Schmidt - lschmidt@eng.umd.edu
DBD Open Workshop Organizers
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