Angela Stone

Educating the global designer

Distributed design teams place a far heavier reliance on communication and collaboration than conventional collocated teams and as a consequence require design team members to acquire and develop an enhanced collaborative skill set. Given that distributed design teams are likely to remain as a dominant feature of product development for the foreseeable future there is a need to ensure that engineering graduates are equipped with the necessary knowledge and skills. This paper describes work carried out and the University of Strathclyde and elsewhere in the development of a curriculum for distributed design.

Using Digital Libraries to Enhance Distributed Design Team Performance

This paper describes the purpose and initial results of a 5-year project to develop, implement and use a testbed to improve the teaching and learning of students partaking in global team based design projects. It is expected that the project will, when complete, fundamentally change the way design engineering is taught by combining the use of digital libraries with virtual design studios. The paper describes the first stage of the project to inculcate basic digital library skills in undergraduate students. Lessons learnt in this first stage are detailed. The project team will be using these lessons to design the next stage of the project.

Distributed team design in small- and medium-sized enterprises: How to get it right

Abstract Readily available and affordable technologies such as the Internet, groupware, and Web conferencing mean that sharing information and data within teams is simple and affordable. However, many small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) struggle to implement or perform distributed collaborative design effectively or even at all. As part of the extended design team of large multinational companies it is not uncommon for SMEs to have collaborative working tools and practice imposed on them to meet the requirements of the multinational. However, many SMEs need to develop their own working practices to support effective, collaborative team design within their own organization or their extended design team. Through a series of case studies, this paper describes how a typical SME achieved successful distributed team design within their organization. A “strategy for effective distributed team design” encompassing the processes, methods, and tools developed and implemented within the company to achieve this success, is presented. In total, four live case studies, spanning a 2-year period, are described; two initial studies focus on current distributed design team practice clearly highlighting issues and areas for improvement, leading to the development of processes, methods, and tools to support distributed collaborative team design. A strategy for effective distributed team design encapsulating these processes methods and tools is presented together with its evaluation through two further live industrial case studies. The case studies themselves, together with the processes, methods, and tools developed by this company, could be adopted by other SMEs directly to achieve the same success. Generic and transferable findings drawn from this study aimed at helping others achieve this success form the conclusion of the paper.

A new viewpoint on inclusive design practice: Implementing design in a small manufacturing company

In recent years, a great deal has been written on Inclusive Design, and its attempts to make products accessible to as many people as possible; the most formal and thorough of these is probably BS 7000:2005*, which gives an accurate definition of the concept: *“Inclusive Design: design of mainstream products and/or services that are accessible to, and usable by, people with the widest range of abilities within the widest range of situations without the need for special adaptation or design.” Most Inclusive Design papers view the issue from making commercial products available to those with impairments however these do not address the issue of making special needs products suitable for those that may not require them but still have to live with them. With the increasing application of inclusive design the special needs market will narrow but not all products will meet specialist requirements, and as such, there will still be a market for special needs products, but these must be ‘inclusive’ of as many people as possible. It is important to understand that special needs products are not only used by those with disabilities. They often replace key products in the home to make coping with day-to-day tasks simpler, but also may have to be used by all other members of the household

The Impact of Documentation and Reflection on Student Learning in Engineering Design

As product development teams become global in scale, more of this process is carried out in the digital domain. This paper examines the impact of basing a student design project in this environment, and in particular how the increased documentation and reflection afforded by this impacts upon student learning. The mechanisms for achieving this included templates, information repositories and video presentations. It was found that a shared information resource had an impact on concept direction and that although students found critical reflection on their design process difficult, that the increased documentation of a digital repository encouraged more transparent working practices.