Saeema Ahmed-Kristensen

A comparative study of changes across the lifecycle of complex products in a variant and a customised industry

This paper focuses upon investigating the characteristics of engineering changes and identifying the main reasons for changes arising during the different phases of the lifecycle of complex engineering products. Two case studies representing products with different development processes have been selected and change documentation analysed. The two cases selected were: (1) a variant design product, an aeroengine and (2) a customised product, drilling equipment for the oil industry. The change requests were analysed to understand their distribution and motivation across the lifecycle of the two products. The findings show that change requests peak during the manufacturing phase and indicate that the motivation for change varies throughout a products lifecycle. The results provide insights into the factors to be considered during the development process in order to reduce the number of change requests from the later phases of a products lifecycle and to support designers to efficiently address the unavoidable change requests. The findings also show that knowledge is transferred implicitly in the customised design case, resulting in very little knowledge of changes transferred to the next generation of products, whereas in the case of the variant design, knowledge can be transferred incrementally to the next generation of products.

Genetic fuzzy modeling of user perception of three-dimensional shapes

Abstract Defining the aesthetic and emotional value of a product is an important consideration for its design. Furthermore, if several designers are faced with the task of creating an object that describes a certain emotion/perception (aggressive, soft, heavy, etc.), each is most likely to interpret the emotion/perception with different shapes composed of a set of different geometric features. The authors propose an automatic approach to formalize the relationships between geometric information of three-dimensional objects and the intended emotional content using fuzzy logic. In addition, the automatically generated fuzzy knowledge base was compared to the users perceptions and to the manually constructed fuzzy knowledge base. The initial findings indicate that the approach is valid to formalize geometric information with perceptions and validate the authors manually developed fuzzy models.

Viewing engineering offshoring in a network perspective: addressing and managing risks

Purpose – Companies are increasingly engaged with global engineering networks through offshoring of product development activities from R&D to production. This creates many new challenges as operations get physically and culturally decoupled. The purpose of this paper is to improve understanding of how to effectively manage engineering offshoring activities in a context of global engineering networks. The main research question, therefore, is: “Can offshoring of engineering tasks be explained and managed using the concept of Global Engineering Networks (GEN)?” Effective approaches to handling the associated risks of engineering offshoring will be a key area of the investigation.Design/methodology/approach – The research approach is based on the engineering design research methodology developed by Blessing and Chakrabarti, including a descriptive phase and a prescriptive phase. Four case studies of large multinational corporations in Denmark were carried out. Data gathering was mainly documentary studies a...

Global product development: the impact on the product development process and how companies deal with it

This paper investigates the impacts companies have experienced as a result of globalising their product development process, and how they have been addressed. Data was collected through case studies of Danish multinational corporations. This paper presents a unique look into global product development through an investigation of its impact on the organisation, the product development process, and the product. Furthermore, it shows the solutions companies employ to minimise the risks of globalisation and the limitations of these solutions. Finally, this paper provides information on the likely causes for these limitations, and suggests how these can be addressed.

Connecting engineering operations to strategic management: a framework for decision making in engineering offshoring

This paper investigates the implications for management and engineering functions and strategies when the product development process is globalised. Five case studies of Danish multinational corporations were conducted. The findings showed that offshoring engineering presented companies with challenges to both management and engineering. These challenges are addressed by management at the operational level. However, this resulted in both positive and negative impacts. We propose this is because there is a decoupling between global engineering operations and the strategic level of the organisation. The Global Decision-Making (GDM) framework described here is a decision-making framework for engineering offshoring decisions for product development activities. The framework proposes that risks in engineering offshoring can be reduced by connecting engineering operations to strategic management. This paper, built upon empirical data, provides a framework wherein to view engineering offshoring which both strengthens the academic field and responds to the needs of practitioners.

Spatial grammar for design synthesis targeting perceptions (case study on beauty)

Tools to aid designers achieve specific perceptions through the aesthetics of their products are needed in order to compete and stand out in the current consumer society. This research aims to develop a spatial grammar to include perceptions. This is conducted through a case study where rules from previous research are used to guide the spatial grammar development and generation of solutions. Results show that it is possible to develop a spatial grammar to design for perception rules extracted from consumers using Semantic Differential (SD) scales and advanced statistics. These elements combined can generate a tool that provides designers with many new aesthetically pleasing solutions. The Spapper module within the FreeCAD software is used for the implementation. Initial work examines only two perception rules (simplicity and tall), and shows the need for the third (curves) to obtain the expected results. Future work should focus on expanding the shapes available for generation (i.e. 3D primitives) to include spheres, ellipsoids, tori, revolved profiles and sweeps, which could increase the number of valid solutions.

Comparing novelty of designs from biological-inspiration with those from brainstorming

ABSTRACT This research aims to understand the significance of biological-analogies in fostering novelty by comparing biological-analogies with other design methods for idea generation. Among other design methods, brainstorming was chosen here as benchmark. Four studies were conducted to compare: (i) the levels of abstraction at which concepts were ideated using biological inspiration (represented using biocards) with that using traditional brainstorming; and (ii) the novelty of concepts produced by using these two design methods. Concepts produced in these studies were evaluated for levels of abstraction at which they were ideated, average novelty, and proportion of high-novelty concepts. Results suggest that concepts generated using biocards were ideated at higher abstraction levels than those using brainstorming, but neither were at the highest abstraction levels. The average novelty of concepts produced using biocards was found to be greater than that using brainstorming; however, no statistically significant difference was found in the proportion of high-novelty concepts. We suspect the lack of biological knowledge and cultural difference among the subjects involved in our studies as the two reasons behind the results. The results demonstrate that the design methods substantially influence the novelty of concepts generated, while indicating the need for better training in effective use of biological-analogies.

Supporting the development of shared understanding in distributed design teams

ABSTRACT Distributed teams are an increasingly common feature of engineering design work. One key factor in the success of these teams is the development of short- and longer-term shared understanding. A lack of shared understanding has been recognized as a significant challenge, particularly in the context of globally distributed engineering activities. A major antecedent for shared understanding is question asking and feedback. Building on question-asking theory this work uses a quasi-experimental study to test the impact of questioning support on homogeneous and heterogeneous teams. The results show significant improvement in shared understanding for both team types (27% improvement for heterogeneous and 16% for homogeneous), as well as substantial differences in how this improvement is perceived. This extends theoretical insight on the development of shared understanding and contributes one of few empirical studies directly comparing homogeneous and heterogeneous teams in the engineering design context. This has implications for how distributed teams can be more effectively supported in practice, as well as how shared understanding can be facilitated in engineering design.

Methods of 3D data applications to inform design decisions for physical comfort

BACKGROUND Past research on anthropometry, especially in the industry of external ear worn products, stresses that positive comfort is enhanced when there is sufficient knowledge of human factors; however, most anthropometric studies focus only on the acquirement and presentation of data. OBJECTIVE The aim of this paper is to provide with different methods to support design applications of 3-dimensional head and ear data with a focus on external ear products. METHODS Two hundred persons representing the Danish population were scanned. The 3D data was collected, refined and analysed in 3 meaningful ways: Advanced geometry, visualisations of data and for the generation of archetypes. RESULTS A matrix containing 29 new ear dimensions was generated. The application of methods led to the development of 9 additional dimensions. The paper finally presents all phases of the analysis of the 3D data in the form of a methodological framework. CONCLUSIONS The paper contributes with, in addition to the methodological framework, techniques to extract data based on product understanding and how the data can be used to define archetypes for focus groups and other qualitative assessments. In their endeavour to develop successful and comfortable products designers should focus more on fitting the task into the human by benchmarking human dimensions against product data.

Extension of internationalisation models: drivers and processes for the globalisation of product development – a comparison of Danish and Chinese engineering firms

Abstract This paper develops an extension to established production- and supply chain management focused internationalisation models. It applies explorative case studies in Danish and Chinese engineering firms to discover how the globalisation process of product development differs from Danish and Chinese perspectives. The paper uses internationalisation and global product development theory to explain similarities and differences in the approaches. Grounded in case study results, a new model for internationalisation is proposed. The new model expands the internationalisation process model to include steps of product development and collaborative distributed development beyond sourcing, sales and production elements. The paper then provides propositions for how to further develop the suggested model, and how western companies can learn from the Chinese approaches, and globalise their product development activities from the front end of the value chain rather than from the back-end.