Graham Green

Visible ideas: information patterns of conceptual sketch activity

The successful design and manufacture of todays increasingly complex engineering products relies to an ever greater extent upon the production and communication of information. The majority of design research to date has concentrated on supporting the information-rich latter stages of design and concerned itself with the distribution of product descriptions for the embodiment and manufacture of products. The conceptual stages of design, typified by vague knowledge and shifting goals, have been excluded from the research investigation. While computer processing power, storage facilities and organisational capabilities could prove useful within the early stages of design what tangible evidence do designers produce that could be captured by digital techniques? This paper studies designers at work in the early stages of design, concentrating on the visible sketching component of the design activity so that it might be understood and its efficiency subsequently improved by computer support.

Using concept sketches to track design progress

Sketching is one of the most important activities in the design and development of new products. Designers produce sketches, from concept design ideas through to highly detailed representations of product artifacts, product sub-assemblies and so on, to communicate with themselves and with others. To this end, the focus of this paper is the description of a study of student designers at work in the early stages of design, with particular emphasis on the visible sketching component of the design process. The study has been carried out to firstly investigate the sketching activity and secondly to explore methods or techniques which might improve the efficiency of this activity. In particular, the paper describes a technique, based upon three types of operation, namely lateral transformations, vertical transformations and duplication, that occur between designers sketches. These transformations can be used to help track the designers thinking mode which, it is envisaged, will increase the efficiency of the sketching activity.

Management of multi-method engineering design research: a case study

There is a need for a research management methodology that will utilise research methods on an individual basis and when combined in a multi-method approach. An agreed methodology would enable rapid progress in achieving agreement on the main issues within engineering design research. Researchers at the University of Glasgow have developed a conceptual management methodology, testing it on three engineering design research projects. This paper describes the methodology and presents results indicating its ability to enable rigorous triangulation of research results obtained via different methods and across different research projects forming the basis of an effective management tool.

On the Developing Role of Physical Models in Engineering Design Education.

Recent research, undertaken using participative observation methods within the Leonardo Da Vinci project ‘Open-Dynamic-Design’, provides evidence that EU industrial practice continues to value the flexibility of physical models across a range of disciplines. This research is placed within the philosophical educational framework established by Schon and examples of implementation within the Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering disciplines at the University of Glasgow are discussed. It is argued that physical models support the concurrent optimisation of design and manufacturing processes and that they represent a continuing generic tool to support engineering design education.

Towards integrated design evaluation: Validation of models

This paper professes the importance of the evaluation activity, particularly during the conceptual phase of the engineering design process. It provides a review of a range of complementary models and reports on research aimed at modelling the evaluation of conceptualdesigns,leading to the proposal of a general framework enabling the combination of separate models into a possible future integrated design evaluation tool. The philosophy underpinning the development of such a tool is that no one model or method should be relied upon during the evaluation activity. Rather, an approach that triangulates the outputs from a number of models should be employed to achieve robust evaluation of competing design concepts and in the retrieval of design cases and data from a supporting knowledge base. To support this approach, three competing theoretical models enabling the concept-specification and pair-wise comparison elements of evaluation activity are compared and validated against a common data set. The results indicate that a consistent output may be expected from such models. This is clearly essential if a valid and reliable generic tool is to emerge. An approach to design case retrieval using design representation comparison is also introduced and contrasted with retrieval via design criteria comparison.

A sketching alphabet for paper-based collaborative design

Despite the importance of the early design phase, designers still lack computer support in rapidly modelling their form concepts in Computer-Aided Design (CAD) systems due to the rigid User-Interface. Owing to its efficacy in instantly capturing ideas, traditional pen-and-paper sketching is still very popular amongst designers to record their concepts not only inside but also outside their office. This paper reports the ongoing research aimed at developing a portable, sketch-based tool allowing designers to obtain and share 3D CAD models on cameraphones directly from paper sketches. More specifically, the focus is on a prescribed sketching alphabet required to create a seamless link between sketching and CAD. Results of semi-structured interviews carried out with various design practitioners contribute important insights into the alphabet suitability. Further, the results and an implemented tool indicate that a sketching language based on this alphabet will be beneficial for designers, especially in a collaborative design environment.

Modelling concept design evaluation

This paper describes the development of models to simulate the process of Concept Design Evaluation. The models are an amalgam of a number of statistically based methods and approaches taken from the probability, reliability, and quality domains. They assume that designers use decomposition of design to undertake evaluation at design characteristic level with the total design evaluation being achieved, in some way, via recomposition. The models described in this paper attempt to describe how designers may perform recomposition and hence total design evaluation. It is argued that the ability to model this human activity is important for the future development of knowledge-based design tools.

New Method to Fabrication 3D Micro-Device Structures

This paper present a new approach for fabricating 3D micro structures based on the elevated structures. The new fabrication method involves combinations of several basic techniques, but a key enabling techniques for the successful development of the fabrication process is combining the photolithography with e-beam lithography processes to create 3-D structures

Investigation of Micro/Milli Flexible Deep Drawing Process

Flexible forming technology provides significant application potential in the manufacturing of complex shaped components even at miniaturized levels. The most attractive characteristic of this technology is simplicity, and its feasibility for prototype processes and low-volume production. The main purpose of this study is to clarify the decisive characteristics of micro deep drawing of metallic foils by using flexible forming technology. In this work a new technique is adopted using rigid punch, rigid holder and rubber pad, so that a particular gap is allocated between the blank holder and a fixed plate to allow the rubber pad to expand through it. The key process parameters studied here are rubber hardness, rubber-pad dimensions, drawing velocity, and initial gap value. Stainless steel 304 foils are used with thickness of 0.1mm. To investigate the effect of soft material properties, urethane rubber with hardness of 20, 40 and 60 shore A is utilized. Also, the punch diameter used in this study is 4mm. Moreover, many drawing experiments are conducted with punch velocities range of (0.1mm/s-100mm/s) to show the effect of process velocity. FEA using the commercial software ABAQUS/Standard is used to simulate the drawing process at micro scale. A hyperelastic material model is adopted to define the flexible pad and an elastic-plastic model is defined for the blanks.

Experimental validation of the R³I design evaluation methodology

How the validity of an emerging design method or methodology, such as relative reliability risk index (R3I), should be tested and demonstrated remains a vital question for the design research community. This paper provides a review of current thinking about the validation process and via a case study seeks to describe how an appropriate controlled experiment was developed to address the validation of a particular methodology. The experimental validation approach described here is shown to be linked to the impact model of research and is built upon the foundations of validation square. The results of this approach to validation suggest that a standard approach to validating emerging design methods is possible. This is illustrated here by demonstrating that an improvement in the quality of evaluating concept designs can be obtained when using the R³I evaluation methodology.