A Process Management Strategy for Re-Design: An Anchoring Adjustment Approach

Author(s):  
Lisa A. Dixon ◽  
Jonathan S. Colton

Abstract Preceding research on the re-design process focused on the development and verification of an Anchoring and Adjustment design process model. Compared to the existing, predominantly top-down, models, this new model was tailored specifically to describe designers’ approaches to re-design tasks. Building upon that work, this paper presents an evaluation of a re-design process strategy that is based on the key elements identified in the Anchoring and Adjustment model (a general pattern for re-design activities and two evaluation metrics). The overall goal was to formulate an efficient and effective process management strategy unique to re-design activities. Data were collected from three industry re-design projects for the evaluation. First, an analysis of the data confirmed that the pattern of design activities and evaluation metrics used by the company’s designers could be mapped onto those that comprise the Anchoring and Adjustment model. Second, the analysis of the data suggested that with additional formalization — based on an anchoring and adjustment approach — the company’s current process management technique could provide more accurate feedback to the designers for the more efficient and effective management of their re-design processes. One of the industry case studies is detailed to illustrate the research results and conclusions.

Author(s):  
Zhiqiang Chen ◽  
Zahed Siddique

The emergence of computer and network technology has provided opportunities for researchers to construct and build systems to support dynamic, real-time, and collaborative engineering design in a concurrent manner. This paper provides an understanding of the product design in a distributed environment where designers are in different geographic locations and are required to be involved in the design process to ensure successful product design. A design process model that captures the major interactions among stakeholders is presented, based on the observation of cooperation and collaboration. The stakeholders’ interactions are divided into activity and system level to distinguish the interactions in group design activities and design perspective evolution. An initial computer implementation of the design model is presented. The design system consists of a set of tools associated with design and a management system to facilitate distributed designers to support various design activities, especially conceptual design. Our research emphasis of design collaboration in this paper is: (i) Model a Cooperative-collaborative design process; (ii) Support synchronized design activities; and (iii) Structure the complex relations of various design perspectives from engineering disciplines.


2019 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 83-102
Author(s):  
Martin Stacey ◽  
Claudia Eckert ◽  
Rafaela Hillerbrand

Abstract Design process models have a complex and changing relationship to the processes they model, and mean different things to different people in different situations. Participants in design processes need to understand each other’s perspectives and agree on what the models mean. The paper draws on philosophy of science to argue that understanding a design process model can be seen as an imagination game governed by agreed rules, to envisage what would be true about the world if the model were correct. The rules depend on the syntax and content of the model, on the task the model is used for, and on what the users see the model as being. The paper outlines twelve alternative conceptualizations of design process models—frames, pathways, positions, proclamations, projections, predictions, propositions, prophecies, requests, demands, proposals, promises—and discusses when they fit situations that stakeholders in design processes can be in. Articulating how process models are conceptualised can both help to understand how process management works and help to resolve communication problems in industrial practice.


2009 ◽  
Vol 131 (6) ◽  
Author(s):  
Qianli Xu ◽  
Jianxin (Roger) Jiao

The design process of product variants involves complicated task planning that needs to leverage a number of design activities and resources. A comprehensive product variant design process model is imperative for capturing the semantics underlying product variants and subsequently supporting design process planning decisions. This paper applies timed colored Petri nets (TCPN) to model various elements of the product variant design process. The TCPN model performs as a generic design process platform from which alternative configurations of process plans can be derived and further converted to discrete-event simulation models for evaluation. A case study of car dashboard family design demonstrates that the TCPN design process model can effectively represent the elements of multiple design processes and support design task planning while leveraging design activities and resource allocation at the entire product family level.


2009 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 33-39 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mario Fargnoli ◽  

The importance of the environmental sustainability of industrial products has become significant both because of the ever-stricter environmental legislation in the field, and the increased demand of customers concerning environmental issues. The development of sustainable products leads engineers to take into consideration environmental aspects in concurrency with traditional technical and economical aspects from the very beginning of design activities. Thus, the role of designers is clear in integrating environmental considerations into the product design activities, increasing the efficiency of the product, reducing waste of materials and energy, and controlling costs of all its life cycle stages. The output of the study consists of the development of an integrated design process model, called Operative EcoDesign Process, which is able to indicate in practice to designers the addresses that can be followed for a more effective and efficient action.


Author(s):  
STEPHEN C.-Y. LU ◽  
JIAN CAI

Collaborative engineering design involves various stakeholders with different perspectives. The design process is relatively complex and difficult to handle. Various conflicts always happen among the design tasks and affect the design team performance. Therefore, to represent the collaborative design process and capture the evolution of design perspectives in a structured way, it is critical to manage the design conflicts and improve the collaborative design productivity. This article provides a generic collaborative design process model based on a sociotechnical design framework. This model has a topological format and adopts process analysis techniques from Petri Nets. By addressing both the technical and social aspects of collaborative design activities, it provides a mechanism to identify the interdependencies among design tasks and perspectives of different stakeholders. Based on this design process model, a methodology of detecting and handling the design conflicts is developed to support collaborative design coordination.


2020 ◽  
Vol 15 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jin Li ◽  
Xingsheng Jiang ◽  
Jingye Li ◽  
Yadong Zhao ◽  
Xuexing Li

Background: In the whole design process of modular fuel tank, there are some unreasonable phenomena. As a result, there are some defects in the design of modular fuel tank, and the function does not meet the requirements in advance. This paper studies this problem. Objective: Through on-the-spot investigation of the factory, a mechanical design process model is designed. The model can provide reference for product design participants on product design time and design quality, and can effectively solve the problem of low product design quality caused by unreasonable product design time arrangement. Methods: After sorting out the data from the factory investigation, computer software is used to program, simulate the information input of mechanical design process, and the final reference value is got. Results: This mechanical design process model is used to guide the design and production of a new project, nearly 3 months ahead of the original project completion time. Conclusion: This mechanical design process model can effectively guide the product design process, which is of great significance to the whole mechanical design field.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-38
Author(s):  
Joshua Gyory ◽  
Nicolas F Soria Zurita ◽  
Jay Martin ◽  
Corey Balon ◽  
Christopher McComb ◽  
...  

Abstract Managing the design process of teams has been shown to considerably improve problem-solving behaviors and resulting final outcomes. Automating this activity presents significant opportunities in delivering interventions that dynamically adapt to the state of a team in order to reap the most impact. In this work, an Artificial Intelligent (AI) agent is created to manage the design process of engineering teams in real time, tracking features of teams' actions and communications during a complex design and path-planning task with multidisciplinary team members. Teams are also placed under the guidance of human process managers for comparison. Regarding outcomes, teams perform equally as well under both types of management, with trends towards even superior performance from the AI-managed teams. The managers' intervention strategies and team perceptions of those strategies are also explored, illuminating some intriguing similarities. Both the AI and human process managers focus largely on communication-based interventions, though differences start to emerge in the distribution of interventions across team roles. Furthermore, team members perceive the interventions from the both the AI and human manager as equally relevant and helpful, and believe the AI agent to be just as sensitive to the needs of the team. Thus, the overall results show that the AI manager agent introduced in this work is able to match the capabilities of humans, showing potential in automating the management of a complex design process.


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