Further to the previous discussion on 'Differences in process between design and other creative disciplines', members of the forum might be interested in the ‘CoLab’ website that has been developed thanks to funding that I received from the UK's Royal Academy of Engineering (RAE). Launched at an RAE dissemination event on 13 September 2011, the site has been created with data produced during a PhD that was undertaken by Dr Eujin Pei (now an academic at De Montfort University) who was jointly supervised by myself (with a background in industrial design) and Dr Ian Campbell (with a background in engineering design).
 
A key finding of the PhD was that differences in the language used to identify design representations by industrial designers and engineering designers was impeding communication and a taxonomy of sketches, drawings, models and prototypes was generated to help improve this situation. Differences were also identified in the ways in which the two groups used design representation and, having validated the taxonomy, this was then used to collect data to identify how design representations were used by industrial designers and engineering designers during four stages of new product development; and which design representations were used to communicate 10 types of design information and 8 types of technical information. This data was collected following interviews with practitioners in the UK and Singapore and presented in rank order as percentage of use by those interviewed i.e. the most popular appears at the top of the list. 

To summarise, CoLab identifies:

- The design representations used by industrial designers and engineering designers during four stages of NPD
- The design representations used by industrial designers and engineering designers to communicate types of design 
   information and technical information
- A taxonomy of 35 design representations grouped into sketches, drawings, models and prototypes

An interesting post doctoral challenge in translating of the tool into a website was the collation of 35 images that were indicative of the design representations presented in the taxonomy. Faced with the prospect of negotiating with a high number of publishers whose images were used in the PhD, we were delighted that our undergraduate industrial design and product design students came to the rescue by providing alternative images.
 
During a more light-hearted moment in the development of the CoLab design tool, I did consider using a 'Top Trump' children's gaming card format in which one performance characteristic, such as the speed of a particular model of sports car, is pitched against that of another manufacturer. Whilst the concept of an engineering designer’s 'Concept of Operation Model' beating an industrial designer’s 'Information Sketch' in communicating information on 'Mechanisms' did have a certain mischievous appeal, this format was discounted for a more scholarly approach.
 
If members are interested in having a look at CoLab, it can be accessed at http://colab.lboro.ac.uk/ and the PhD thesis on which it is based is at http://hdl.handle.net/2134/5432
 
I hope that members find CoLab tool of interest.

Thanks
 
Mark


Dr Mark Evans
Loughborough Design School
Loughborough University