Jonathan Cagan

A Study of Design Fixation, Its Mitigation and Perception in Engineering Design Faculty

The bridge between engineering design and cognitive science research is critical to understand the effectiveness of design methods as implemented by human designers. The study reported in this paper evaluates the effects of design fixation in a group of engineering design faculty, and also provides evidence for approaches to overcome design fixation. Three conditions are compared, a control, a fixation group whom were provided with an example solution, and a defixation group whom were also given materials to mitigate their design fixation. Measures include indicators of design fixation and participant perceptions. The study demonstrates that the engineering design faculty show statistically significant evidence of design fixation, but only partially perceive its effects. This study also indicates that design fixation can be mitigated. The group of participants in this study, due to their background in engineering design research and experience with student design teams, was expected to have more accurate perceptions or awareness of design fixation than the typical participant. Understanding the incongruities between participant perceptions and quantitative design outcomes are particularly of interest to researchers of design methods. For this study, clear evidence exists that designers, even those that study and teach design on a regular basis, do not know when they are being influenced or fixated by misleading or poor information. DOI: 10.1115/1.4001110

Speaking the Buick language: capturing, understanding, and exploring brand identity with shape grammars

Abstract Developing and maintaining a consistent brand statement is an important aspect of developing a successful product. However, maintaining that statement is difficult due in part to the inconsistent and often insufficient understanding of brand by marketing, engineering, and industrial design. This paper presents shape grammars as a method for encoding the key elements of a brand into a repeatable language, which can be used to generate products consistent with the brand. A detailed investigation into the history of Buick styling reveals the brand characteristics of the front view of Buick vehicles, which are then captured in a shape grammar.

A Survey of Computational Approaches to Three- dimensional Layout Problems

The component layout or packaging problem requires efficient search of large, discontinuous spaces. This survey paper reviews the state-of-the-art in product layout algorithms. The focus on optimization and geometric interference calculation strategies addresses the common aspects of the layout problem for all applications.

A blend of different tastes: the language of coffeemakers

Shape grammars, utilizing function labels, are shown to be applicable to product design. A grammar that describes a language of coffeemakers is presented and shown to generate a large class of coffeemakers currently on the market, as well as new designs that could be introduced to consumers.

On the Benefits and Pitfalls of Analogies for Innovative Design: Ideation Performance Based on Analogical Distance, Commonness, and Modality of Examples

Drawing inspiration from examples by analogy can be a powerful tool for innovative design during conceptual ideation but also carries the risk of negative design outcomes (e.g., design fixation), depending on key properties of examples. Understanding these properties is critical for effectively harnessing the power of analogy. The current research explores how variations in analogical distance, commonness, and representation modality influence the effects of examples on conceptual ideation. Senior-level engineering students generated solution concepts for an engineering design problem with or without provided examples drawn from the U.S. Patent database. Examples were crossed by analogical distance (near-field vs. far-field), commonness (more vs. less-common), and modality (picture vs. text). A control group that received no examples was included for comparison. Effects were examined on a mixture of ideation process and product variables. Our results show positive effects of far-field and less-common examples on novelty and variability in quality of solution concepts. These effects are not modulated by modality. However, detailed analyses of process variables suggest divergent inspiration pathways for far-field vs. less-common examples. Additionally, the combination of far-field, less-common examples resulted in more novel concepts than in the control group. These findings suggest guidelines for the effective design and implementation of design-by-analogy methods, particularly a focus on far-field, less-common examples during the ideation process.

Agent-Based Synthesis of Electromechanical Design Configurations

A new automated approach to engineering design known as A-design is presented that creates design configurations through the interaction of software agents. By combining unique problem solving strategies, these agents are able to generate solutions to openended design problems. The A-design methodology makes several theoretical claims through its combination of multiagent systems, multiobjective design selection, and stochastic optimization, and is currently implemented to solve general electromechanical design problems. While this paper presents an overview of the theoretical basis for A-design, it primarily focuses on the method for representing electromechanical design configurations and the reasoning of the agents that construct these configurations. Results from an electromechanical test problem show the generality of the functional representation.

Computer-Based Design Synthesis Research: An Overview

One of the hallmarks of engineering design is the design synthesis phase where the creativity of the designer most prominently comes into play as solutions are generated to meet underlying needs. Over the past decades, methodologies for generating concepts and design solutions have matured to the point that computation-based synthesis provides a means to explore a wider variety of solutions and take over more tedious design tasks. This paper reviews advances in function-based, grammar-based, and analogy-based synthesis approaches and their contributions to computational design synthesis research in the last decade.

A Shape Annealing Approach to Optimal Truss Design With Dynamic Grouping of Members

A shape annealing approach to truss topology design is presented that considers the tradeoff between the mass of the structure and the grouping of members, where all members of a group are given the same size. The problem of optimal grouping involves finding a structural design with an optimal number of groups and the optimal sizes for each group. In this paper cross-sectional area is considered as the measure of group size. Designs incorporating multiple members with the same cross-sectional area are advantageous when considering the cost of purchasing and fabricating materials. The shape annealing method is used as an approach to solve this problem by incorporating a method for dynamic grouping of members based on cross-sectional area that creates a tradeoff between mass and the number of groups through a weighted objective function that includes a group penalty function. This method is demonstrated on transmission tower and general truss problems.

A simulated annealing-based algorithm using hierarchical models for general three-dimensional component layout

An efficient simulated annealing-based algorithm which optimizes component layout is presented. The efficiency comes in the algorithms ability to calculate component overlap quickly by taking advantage of a hierarchical decomposition of the models geometry. The result is an algorithm able to optimize the placement of components of arbitrary geometry inside an arbitrarily shaped container over multiple design goals and subject to inter-component spatial and performance constraints. The algorithm is demonstrated on test problems of known solution, and a variety of industrial problems of a priori unknown solution.

A Simulated Annealing-Based Approach to Three-Dimensional Component Packing

This paper introduces a simulated annealing-based approach to three-dimensional component packing that employs simulated annealing to generate optimal solutions. Simulated annealing has been used extensively for two-dimensional layout of VLSI circuits; this research extends techniques developed for two-dimensional layout optimization to three-dimensional problems which are more representative of mechanical engineering applications. This research also provides a framework in which to solve general component layout problems.