Adrian,
As I understand it, clarifying differences between product and version
has very little to do with the designed artefacts or their properties.
Product/version differentiation is a people issue that is mainly to do
with economic use of filing systems and cognitive resources. Its a problem
of classification that depends on the systems of those creating or using
the product (or the design not the product/design itself
If you look at the benefits for each stakeholder in a design process and
design use, you will see different reasons for particular product/verision
differentiation classification. Sometimes stakeholders accord, sometimes
they don't. For a design company, the product/version classification issue
is about who works on the project, how informationa associated with it
is filed, how it is referred to in indexes of the filing system and in
company documentation. For the marketer, 'product' and 'version' are concepts
that provide useful marketing and sales promotion differentiation - almost
regardless of product characterisitics. For the customer, product/version
differentiation gives a manageable picture of the detail of a product,
compared to others they might use or buy and to products they already
own. For software system managers, software product and version issues
are important in terms of problems that result from uninteded incompatibilitie
s between software packages and systems. For software designers and programmers
, product and version may be almost incommensurate concepts. The product
concept is different from the version (e.g. ver 1.0 stable release) and
its version (e.g. ver 1.0.2 stable release fix 2).
You point directly to the above point of view in explaining below why
you want to formally define produc and version. The object class issue
means almost certainly that the classes have properties that depend more
on how they are used - in this case, different perspectives and classifications
based on stakeholder definitions for particular poducts may be useful.
If you find an efficient way of doing this with UML please let me know.
Best wishes,
Terry
========================================
From: Adrian Espinosa <[log in to unmask]>
To: Internet Mail::[[log in to unmask]]
Subject: Re: Product v Version
Date: 4/30/02 9:49 PM
About the product v version doubt, probably I didn't ask the right
question. I will try to clarify and explain more about my research
(Ph.D.).
I am in a group working on engineering design support systems. In my
case I am dealing with the design history of a product, and more
specifically with the design intent of a product. So when a product is
being redesign, many pieces of information are produced (e.g. sketches,
drawings, concepts, etc.), the important piece of information I am more
interested in, is the design intent.
Now, we are developing database (or knowledge-base) structures (using
Unified Modeling Language) to store the information. In this structures
the relationships are "is a", "has", "uses" and some others, but these
are the more used. This way we can express the next idea: A system "is
a" product, the system "has" subsystems, the subsystem "has" parts and
the part "has" components. On the other hand in the structure we can
have a class named "view" and say a product "has" views (manufacture,
assembly, ergonomics, aesthetics, etc), many perspectives from which the
product can be "described". And many other classes that describe how the
information should be stored to provide the engineering designer with
a
tool to make decisions.
In the case of the product and version, when a product is being
redesigned, depending on the level of redesign some new conceptual ideas
needs to be produced (and evaluate each idea then choose one, and follow
all the design process stages), or do a detail design level and changes
in geometry, materials or tolerances are made. In these changes there
is
an intent of the designer: "Why" these changes are made. And as a
complementary information the "effects" of the changes in all the
different views a product has, and a global evaluation of the changes
is
done.
So in the case of the Dyson cleaner (I am not using the term vacuum on
purpose), as I was saying when competitors redesign their cleaners, and
change the concept (the cyclone concept is new for carpet cleaners), are
they producing a new product or a new version of the same product?. This
is to have an structure that better reflects how the information can be
stored and used.
I hope this is clear enough to explain the why of my doubts. If someone
is interested I can send an accepted paper for the EDC2002.
Thanks in advanced
Adrian
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