William Ion

Embedding an integrated learning environment and digital repository in design engineering education: lessons learned for sustainability

This paper describes how a system comprising a learning environment and digital repository is being embedded into the teaching and learning of Design Engineering at the University of Strathclyde. It then maps out the issues that have been encountered, how these have been overcome and how other departments or institutions would be affected if they were to roll out and scale up the use of such tools. These issues are categorised as technological, pedagogical and cultural, and include the adequate provision of support, creating a critical mass of resources, ensuring quality and integration with other technologies. Successful embedding and sustainability requires that senior managers reflect on these key issues at a departmental and/or institutional level before implementation.

Global Design to Gain a Competitive Edge

Lets read! We will often find out this sentence everywhere. When still being a kid, mom used to order us to always read, so did the teacher. Some books are fully read in a week and we need the obligation to support reading. What about now? Do you still love reading? Is reading only for you who have obligation? Absolutely not! We here offer you a new book enPDFd global design to gain a competitive edge to read.

HOLISTIC ENGINEERING DESIGN: A COMBINED SYNCHRONOUS AND ASYNCHRONOUS APPROACH

To aid the creation and through-life support of large, complex engineering products, organizations are placing a greater emphasis on constructing complete and accurate records of design activities. Current documentary approaches are not sufficient to capture activities and decisions in their entirety and can lead to organizations revisiting and in some cases reworking design decisions in order to understand previous design episodes. Design activities are undertaken in a variety of modes; many of which are dichotomous, and thus each require separate documentary mechanisms to capture information in an efficient manner. It is possible to identify the modes of learning and transaction to describe whether an activity is aimed at increasing a level of understanding or whether it involves manipulating information to achieve a tangible task. The dichotomy of interest in this paper is that of synchronous and asynchronous working, where engineers may work alternately as part of a group or as individuals and where different forms of record are necessary to adequately capture the processes and rationale employed in each mode. This paper introduces complimentary approaches to achieving richer representations of design activities performed synchronously and asynchronously, and through the undertaking of a design based case study, highlights the benefit of each approach. The resulting records serve to provide a more complete depiction of activities undertaken, and provide positive direction for future co-development of the approaches.

A framework for supporting intelligent and flexible workflow-based engineering design process

To support an efficient management of a creative and dynamic Engineering Design Process (EDP), this paper proposes a new intelligent and flexible workflow-based EDP management framework entitled EnDesProM. The Autonomic Object (AO) based on autonomic computing is embedded in the nodes of flexible workflow to ensure the intelligence of the framework. An innovative flexible workflow modelling method based on dynamic instance creation is proposed as part of the EnDesProM. Both the formalised definition and graphical expression of the EDP models are introduced to ensure the rigour of the approach. The architecture of the intelligent workflow is designed and the application of the weighted Certainty Factor (CF) model in the knowledge expression is investigated to deal with the incomplete information in EDP. The EnDesProM has been evaluated through an EDP in a Make-to-Order (MTO) company and the results show that EnDesProM can support the creative and dynamic EDP satisfactorily, though further improvements are required.

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.

An evaluation study of a digital library of ideas: Workflow Model and classroom use

The Department of Design Manufacturing and Engineering Management at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, UK, has been developing a digital library to support design engineering student learning through the Digital Libraries for Global Distributed Innovative Design Education and Teamwork project (http://www.didet.ac.uk, December, 2007). Previous related studies have observed and analysed how students search for, store, structure and share design engineering information (Grierson et al. in paper presented at the Network Learning Conference, pp. 572–579, 2004; Nicol et al. in Open Learning 20(1):31–49, 2005) and these studies have identified the need for the design and development of a digital library with two system components, which best suit the design process: (i) an informal shared workspace; the ‘LauLima’ Learning Environment and (ii) a repository of more formal searchable and browsable design information; the ‘LauLima’ Digital Library (McGill et al. in Br. J. Educ. Technol. 36(4):629–642, 2005). This paper focuses on the Workflow Model developed to populate the digital library and presents findings from early use of the digital library by students and staff.

Enhancing the design dialogue: an architecture to document engineering design activities

This paper charts the development of a system architecture designed to address the challenges associated with creating accurate and re-usable records of synchronous design activities. It begins by describing the context of through-life support of engineering products, then presents the Knowledge Enhanced Notes system development work undertaken and provides direction for future research work in this area. An empirical research approach was adopted for this work incorporating 11 experimental episodes, ethnographic studies and case-based evaluation of the developed system. The approach and development of the system architecture within this research build upon and extend existing research in the area of knowledge and information capture. The proposed system architecture is proven to enhance the record of engineering design activities, demonstrating that the implementation of software-based tools can have a positive impact on the creation of a more accurate and complete record of activities. This research is focused on one category of design activities – synchronous; therefore, future research that focuses on asynchronous working, leading to an overall enhancement of design working, is needed. While the focus of the research was to aid the creation and through-life support of large, complex engineering products, the solution is entirely generic in its application to synchronous activities.

A framework for design engineering education in a global context

Abstract This paper presents a framework for teaching design engineering in a global context using innovative technologies to enable distributed teams to work together effectively across international and cultural boundaries. The Digital Libraries for Global Distributed Innovative Design, Education, and Teamwork (DIDET) Framework represents the findings of a 5-year project conducted by the University of Strathclyde, Stanford University, and Olin College that enhanced student learning opportunities by enabling them to partake in global, team-based design engineering projects, directly experiencing different cultural contexts and accessing a variety of digital information sources via a range of innovative technology. The use of innovative technology enabled the formalization of design knowledge within international student teams as did the methods that were developed for students to store, share, and reuse information. Coaching methods were used by teaching staff to support distributed teams and evaluation work on relevant classes was carried out regularly to allow ongoing improvement of learning and teaching and show improvements in student learning. Major findings of the 5-year project include the requirement to overcome technological, pedagogical, and cultural issues for successful eLearning implementations. The DIDET Framework encapsulates all the conclusions relating to design engineering in a global context. Each of the principles for effective distributed design learning is shown along with relevant findings and suggested metrics. The findings detailed in the paper were reached through a series of interventions in design engineering education at the collaborating institutions. Evaluation was carried out on an ongoing basis and fed back into project development, both on the pedagogical and the technological approaches.

Remanufacturing H13 steel moulds and dies using laser metal deposition

The exploitation of Additive Manufacturing (AM) in the repair and remanufacture of industrial components, such as moulds and dies, has become an emerging research area due to the expected reduction of replacement cost and the promise of better mechanical and wear resistance properties – moreover, the use of remanufacturing standards ensures a greater than or equal to warranty part quality. Further studies plan to utilize Laser Metal Deposition (LMD) to remanufacture artificially worn H13 Steel samples, allowing benchmarking studies to be conducted in order to compare the mechanical and wear resistance performance of LMD against current welding repair technologies. The specimens will be subjected to an accelerated pressure and elevated temperatures schedule, simulating the loading cycles during the use of the die sets. The effects on the resulting part properties of different process parameters setup, including the type and characteristics of the deposited powder will be studied.

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.