Requirements Engineering and Design for Variety
According to a study, over 40% of all defects in a product are due to either
requirements not appropriately identified or utilized during design. Identification of appropriate
requirements early in the product development process and their appropriate utilization during the
process are essential for developing high quality products. The focus of work has been to understand
the process and mechanisms of requirement identification and satisfaction, and their impact
on the quality of products and process.
Design for variety refers to commonalising various aspects of a product
portfolio in order to optimize costs of a product while offering equivalent variety to the customer
segments. The focus of research has been to provide commonalisation of materials and processes
across a product portfolio.
Design Synthesis and Creativity
Engineering design synthesis is considered as a fundamental subset of the
process of engineering design that helps in the transformation of function into alternative,
creative structures that can satisfy the function. Many researchers consider engineering design
synthesis as a central area of design research. Earlier work in this area can be categorised under
one or more of the following questions:
What is engineering design synthesis?Several researchers have defined
engineering design synthesis. The definitions are often overlapping and comprise: synthesis as
designing, synthesis as problem solving, synthesis as design solution generation, synthesis as
design problem and solution generation and synthesis as exploration, which together comprise the
processes of task formulation, design representation, composition, design generation, design
interpretation and re-interpretation, design evaluation, search and optimization.
How is engineering design synthesis currently done carried out?This
involves understanding several theories, models and approaches proposed earlier for engineering
design synthesis. This understanding serves as the basis for the improvement of engineering design
synthesis.
How to support design synthesis?Based on an understanding of how
engineering design synthesis is performed, guidelines, methods, tools, etc. are developed and
evaluated to better support engineering design synthesis.
Design Creativity is the ability to identify, visualize and interpret a
problem in unusual and interesting ways and to synthesise and develop novel and interesting ideas
and solutions. Our research led to the development of: (1) a common definition of creativity that
provided an overarching view of what were reflected variously in the myriad definitions by earlier
authors, (2) a set of empirically validated measures for the two crucial components of technical
creativity , novelty and usefulness , and their relationships to creativity, and (3) the major
factors that influence design creativity. A major observational study undertaken discovered that
only four fundamental search processes occurred in engineering design, irrespective of what design
problems are solved, by whom, and whether individually or in teams.
Eco-Design and Sustainability
Eco-Design is an approach to designing systems with an intent of reducing
its impact on the environment. It is often used synonymously with green design, design for
environment. One of the guiding principles of Eco-Design is to consider environmental impacts in the
entire lifecycle: from raw material extraction to after-usage through production, distribution and
usage. Our research involves understanding designers requirements and developing frameworks, methods
and tools to assist them in designing systems with environmentally friendly lifecycles.
Sustainability is the ability to meet our needs and aspirations without
compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs and aspirations. The term
sustainability is generally referred in the context of development i.e. in Sustainable Development.
To develop sustainably is to continue improvement in harmony with the environment, society and
economy.
Design Collaboration and Knowledge Management
Knowledge Management is about people, using technology to enable more
efficient processes so that they are better able to capture, store, retrieve, use, reuse and share
both explicit and tacit knowledge for the financial and business interest of the company (Hylton,
2002). When it concerns product development, knowledge management addresses the needs of product
development teams to capture, store, and effectively utilize knowledge in the organization. The
research questions of interest include: what types of knowledge are generated in an organization?
How much of these are captured and reused? What knowledge is not captured that should have been
otherwise?
The current design scenario of ever increasing customer requirements and
continuous reduction in products life, forces companies to develop more complex and innovative
products with high quality and low cost concurrently, in order to meet the above challenges with an
ever decreasing time to market. Collaborative design is an area that has high potential
impact in enabling companies achieve this. Companies should utilize all competence available, work
in teams and scout for talent across the globe to face these challenges. Collaborative design is a
process in which products are designed through collective effort of many designers. Distributed
collaborative design is a process in which products are designed through collaboration among design
teams that often work in parallel, using various engineering tools distributed in separate
locations, across various time zones around the world. A large number of factors influence the
collaborative design. Currently the relationships among these factors are not well-understood. The
current research interests include: understanding and structuring interactions among designers
during co-located and distributed design collaborations, and the knowledge processes that occur
during these interactions.
Product Aesthetics and Design for Emotions
Better looking products attract more customer attention. As technology in
products saturates, the appeal of the product to the customer becomes the key differentiator; this
is known to strongly influence purchase decisions. Also, in an increasingly competitive market
wherein producers vie for limited consumer attention, the look and feel of products virtually
drive the bottom-line of some sectors. Given that purchase decisions cumulatively make or break
companies, research in this area assumes great importance. We are interested in questions such as:
What constitutes aesthetic appeal of a product? How to make products aesthetically appealing?
Emotions enliven us every day and hour. Products we interact with seem to
gather more importance as they enhance our capabilities. In such a context it becomes important to
know in what way products are used as intended by designers. Across varied sectors of product
manufacturers this requirement is varied, though fundamentally it is the emotion that the products
evoke in us that strike connections engaging us in intended or un-intended way. How to make products
convey or evoke particular emotions? Answers to such questions are necessary for designers of all
kinds of products. This is our primary research interest.
Design Pedagogy
Design pedagogy is the area of inquiry into processes and tools for design
learning and education. Work carried out in IdeasLab in this area include development of new
teaching methods and curricula in the areas of design methodology, design creativity, and design
research methodology.
Design Research Methodology
A research discipline is as good as its research methodology. The
relatively new and interdisciplinary discipline of design research requires a robust, well-tested
research methodology for supporting the quality of research output and its acceptance in the
industry and society. Design Research Methodology: I developed DRM (jointly with Ken Wallace in
Cambridge and Lucienne Blessing in Luxembourg) - arguably the most widely used design research
methodology in the world. DRM has been taught in several national and international courses for the
last ten years in Europe and India, training over four hundred PhD students in using DRM for their
research. DRM has also been published in a Springer book in July 2009, co-authored by the Lucienne
Blessing and myself, and already sold over three hundred copies. Current research constitutes
further development of detailed aspects of the methodology in collaboration with Lucienne Blessing.
