Stephen Culley

Reuse of ideas and concepts for creative stimuli in engineering design

Creative idea generation is essential to novel concept development and ultimately innovation. The following paper describes an extensive industry-based study investigating the use of creative stimuli during a brainstorming session at the conceptual stages of design. A new approach to retrieving creative stimuli referred to as ‘Sweeper’ is proposed, which sources stimuli internal to a companys information repository. This creative stimuli tool is then compared to other creative stimuli tools using objective, industrially grounded performance criteria. This study provides an arguably much needed real, industrially-based experiment regarding brainstorming. The results and observations suggest that having a guided approach to sourcing creative stimuli is very beneficial. The use of the TRIZ contradiction matrix and inventive principles is also shown to be a good example of a guided approach in terms of increasing creative performance. However, the Sweeper tool using internally sourced stimuli provides a method that is useful and more a practical alternative, as it is based firmly in the domain of activity.

Information Access Diagrams: A Technique for Analyzing the Usage of Design Information

SUMMARY This paper presents the development and application of an information modelling technique—information access diagrams (IADs). This new technique attempts to represent the key information sources commonly accessed by engineering designers and to identify the most frequently undertaken access paths or routes for obtaining them. This modelling approach may therefore be used to gain an understanding of the methods that engineering designers use when accessing design information (either internal or external to their enterprise). Elements of the IADs were derived, firstly, from observations of engineering designers in practice, and, secondly, from the use of the IDEFIX modelling technique. Using the key findings from 20 case studies, the IADs are demonstrated in real design situations. In particular, the paper focuses on the access paths or routes undertaken during a number of different design activities and provides cross-references against: the size of enterprise, design complexity, design type, desig...

Suppliers in New Product Development: Their Information and Integration

This paper presents and discusses issues of relevance to those seeking to incorporate the information and knowledge available from suppliers into the engineering design process. More specifically, based on the findings from a questionnaire survey of practising engineering designers and managers within the UK, it indicates how many organisations may be selecting suboptimal suppliers, may be making inappropriate decisions on supplier integration, and may be poorly managing the information and knowledge available from suppliers. It also highlights a number of worrying deficiencies in current procedures and suggests areas for further development.

Rapid changeover - a pre-requisite for responsive manufacture

The ability to effect rapid changeover on a manufacturing line, from one product to another, is a key pre‐requisite for increased flexibility, lead time reduction and responsive manufacture. However it is a rarity for changeover times to be part of the design specification of a new machine tool or tooling system and even when it is, there are few design guidelines for translating the required changeover time into reality. This paper describes a set of “design for changeover” rules that have been derived from action research, carried out within a variety of companies. The rules address the design of machines, tooling, ancillary equipment and the products themselves and their use has been shown, through case studies, to lead to a significant reduction in changeover time and a leaner, more responsive manufacturing environment.

The influence of information technology in new product development: Observations of an empirical study of the access of engineering design information

A major influence in the design and development of new products as well as in the efficient execution of the business is that of information; and in particular its access, distribution and subsequent usage by the design team. However, the combiuation of the wide variety of formats used in the delivery of this information and the diverse range of locations from which it may be obtained result in a number of problems that cannot be easily resolved simply by continually investing in information technology (IT). This paper focuses on the use of information within new product development and reports on the use of IT to support this. It provides an improved understanding of the methods by which members of the design team currently retrieve, apply and subsequently transfer their information. Implications on the future development of IT systems are considered in view of this and suggestions made for their modification. The paper uses as its basis the key findings of an empirical study of design teams within the engineering UK industry.

Making sense of engineering design review activities

Abstract Engineering design reviews, which take place at predetermined phases of the product development process, are fundamental elements for the evaluation and control of engineering activities. These meetings are also acknowledged as unique opportunities for all the parties involved to share information about the product and related engineering processes. For product development teams, the knowledge generated during a design review is not as secondary as it may seem; key design decisions, design experiences, and associated rationale are frequently made explicit. Useful work has been carried out on the design review process itself, but little work has been undertaken about the detailed content of the meeting activity; it is argued that understanding the transactions that take place during a meeting is critical to building an effective knowledge-oriented recording strategy. To this effect, an extensive research program based on case studies in the aerospace engineering domain has been carried out. The work reported in this paper focuses on a set of tools and methods developed to characterize and analyze in depth the transactions observed during a number of case studies. The first methodology developed, the transcript coding scheme, uses an intelligent segmentation of meeting discourse transcriptions. The second approach, which bypasses the time consuming transcribing operation, is based on a meeting capture template developed to enable a meeting observer to record the transactions as the meeting takes place. A third method, the information mapping technique, has also been developed to interpret the case study data in terms of decisions, actions, rationale, and lessons learned, effectively generating qualitative measures of the information lost in the formal records of design reviews. Overall, the results generated by the set of tools presented in this paper have fostered a practical strategy for the knowledge intensive capture of the contents of design reviews. The concluding remarks also discuss possible enhancements to the meeting analysis tools presented in this paper and future work aimed at the development of a computer supported capture software for design reviews.

A Comparison Between the Provision of Information to Engineering Designers in the UK and the USA

Understanding the information accessing activities of engineering designers has been a topic of considerable interest both to industrialists and researchers alike in forming the basic requirements and specification for document management systems, engineering database management systems and information delivery systems. As part of this effort studies have been undertaken to establish how the designers themselves access and distribute this information. However, such studies have been specific to the host country in which the research was originated and comparisons with the wider design community across the world have not possible to establish or quantify. This paper will present the salient findings and observations of a global comparison between engineering designers working within the UK and USA. It is based on two questionnaire surveys, one undertaken in each of the two countries, where over 300 designers were questioned. Thus, it is anticipated that this paper would serve to enhance the management of information and the associated information delivery systems on a world-wide basis.

A grand challenge: immortal information and through-life knowledge management (KIM)

‘Immortal information and through-life knowledge management: strategies and tools for the emerging product-service business paradigm’, is a Grand Challenge project involving eleven different UK universities and incorporating substantial industry collaboration. It is investigating a range of issues associated with the move towards a product-service paradigm in the engineering sector, in particular the long-term curation of digital data, learning from production and use, and appropriate governance and management techniques.

Changeover improvement: A maintenance perspective

Abstract The current paper assesses on-machine maintenance in the context of recent work to improve changeover performance. It is argued that techniques employed to improve changeovers equally might be applied in maintenance situations. With brief reference to case studies from the authors’ research, it is further argued that focused maintenance activity can also directly influence changeover performance, particularly by ensuring that items involved during a changeover (change parts, product, fixed machine components and consumables) are in satisfactory condition. The role of design to improve either changeover or maintenance performance is also discussed. Design rules that might be employed are introduced.

Designing for 'use phase' energy losses of domestic products

Abstract The energy efficiency of products can be established by calculating the energy losses of the product. This paper shows that there are two kinds of losses: intrinsic losses, determined by the technology and materials used to construct the product, and user-related losses, which are caused by varying and inefficient use of that product by the user. User-related losses are a significant proportion of energy use of products and are likely to increase in proportion as engineers use good design and technology to drive the intrinsic losses closer and closer to what the authors call the theoretical minimum. The paper goes on to set out a theoretical framework for understanding and calculating the intrinsic and user-related losses of products and concludes by suggesting an outline of appropriate design strategies for tackling them.