It is a very interesting statement.
I, myself, work in an engineering design research facility, and found the Charlotte's statement as interesting as it may be true. But the questions that make concrete the need for a more formalist/systematic approach on the project of designing something are:
- There is a huge amount of technical parameters of different knowledge areas. As the error tolerances (in management/production/design processes) are decreasing by the massive competition, people should be somewhat specialized, somewhat generalist (it would be ambiguous, but it is true) in order to develop your part on the design project aligned with the entire process in the whole design team. But, as the system complexity grows, more specialized should be the knowledge applied on the design process
- Because of that, there would be a need for rationalizing, even when gathering the information needed for the act of designing - Pahl & Beitz and other authors on engineering design make an approach called informational design, in that a logical process is applied in order to get, efficiently and effectively, real parameters about the state of the art, the needs of the users and other clients (in a life-cycle approach) and the design speifications taht woud really make a difference in what would be stated as 'client
satisfacion'.
- In complex designs, the logic A + B = A + B tends to be true. Because of that, the errors on elementary parts tend to accumulate as they are maunted in oder to build a functional system. This would lead to malfunction - catastrophic on systems such as the hydraulic support in the aerospace industry or often not harmful, but important failures that would lead the system to stop working. Because of the need for diminishing errors and optimized technical designs thare are a lot of toolboxes/methods with the purpose to formalize
the design process and to make possible its tracking in order to correct errors as soon as possible.
TRIZ, for optimizing, FMEA (Failure Mode/Effect Analysis) for preventing or analysing/correcting technical errors, and QFD (Quality Function Deployment), for better reaching the customer technical requirements/needs, are examples of such a dynamic.
I suggest a little bibliography on engineering design in order to better understand the formalization of the design process on technical systems:
PAHL, G. & BEITZ, W. - Engineering design: a systematic approach. English edition, Springer Verlag, 1999
HUBKA, V. & EDER, W.E. - Design Science. Springer Verlag, 1996
On the design toolboxes/methods that I've specified in this message:
HAUSER, J. R. & CLAUSING, D. - The House of Quality. In: Harvard Business Review Magazine, May-June 1988, pgs 63-73
MAZUR, G. - Theory of Inventive Problem Solving (TRIZ). In: http://www.mazur.net/triz, acessed in 23 Sept. 2002.
CLAUSING, D. - Total Quality Development: a step-by-step guide to worldclass concurrent engineering. ASME Press, 1994, pgs. 175-273.
A small statement:
The interaction/comunication design process (what should be applied to industrial design practitioners) may still be driven in a more flexible way, less formalized, relying on the talent of the industrial designer - educated in order to be a master on digital rendering or handsketching, with a less systematic approach on the interaction/communication phenomena that take part when the final user interacts with the object - to make the design as effective for user interaction as it could be.
There might be arguments not fully explained. Anyway, I'm just learning to practice designing in a more reflective way, in order to improve my conceiving acts. And this list helps me somewhat in building my knowledge about the design act itself with the purpose of seeking new horizons in the entire process
Cheers!
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Vinicius Kaster Marini
Co-op student: NEDIP/UFSC
Florianópolis/SC - Brazil
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