scholarly journals A Novel Approach to Quantifying Designer’s Mental Stress in the Conceptual Design Process

2007 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shan Zhu ◽  
Shengji Yao ◽  
Yong Zeng
Keyword(s):  
Natural Language ◽  
Conceptual Design ◽  
Design Process ◽  
Mental Stress ◽  
Evaluation Methodology ◽  
Efficient Design ◽  
Passenger Compartment ◽  
Novel Approach ◽  
Formal Tool ◽  
Thinking Process

The objective of this paper is to quantify designer’s mental stress during the conceptual design process. Quantifying the designer’s mental stress would assist the effort of understanding the designer’s creative and innovative process. In this paper, Recursive Object Modelling (ROM) is used as a formal tool to represent the designer’s mental state in each step of the conceptual design process. During the conceptual design process, designers usually describe the design states using natural language, combined with sketches. The description based on natural language will be transformed into ROM diagram through the lexical, syntactic, and structure analysis. A cognitive experiment, which is to design a new litter-disposal system in a passenger compartment located in the trains of NS (Dutch Railways), is built to study designer’s thinking process. ROM is used to analyze and quantify the designer’s mental stress based on the protocol data collected in the experiment. The validation through the cognitive experiment shows that ROM is an efficient design evaluation methodology, which reflects the nature and the characteristics of the design process. The designer’s mental stress presents dynamic, nonlinear, and spiral trend.

scholarly journals Conceptual Design of Electromechanical Actuation Systems for Large-Sized Directional Control Valves

Actuators ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (6) ◽  
pp. 133
Author(s):  
Tobias Vonderbank ◽  
Katharina Schmitz
Keyword(s):  
Conceptual Design ◽  
Design Process ◽  
Operating Conditions ◽  
Function Structure ◽  
Advantages And Disadvantages ◽  
Conceptual Designs ◽  
Actuation Systems ◽  
Electromechanical Actuation ◽  
Function Structures ◽  
Valve Actuation

Increasing performance in modern hydraulics is achieved by a close investigation of possible enhancements of its components. Prior research has pointed out that electromechanical actuators can form suitable alternatives to hydraulically piloted control systems. Since the requirements at these actuation systems depend on the operating conditions of the system, each actuator can be optimized to the respective hydraulic system. Considering that many different conceptual designs are suitable, the phase of conceptual design plays a decisive role during the design process. Therefore, this paper focuses on the process of developing new conceptual designs for electromechanical valve actuation systems using the method of function structures. Aiming to identify special design features, which need to be considered during the design process of electromechanical actuation systems, an exemplary actuator was designed based on the derived function structure. To highlight the potential of function structures for the development of new electromechanical valve actuation systems, two principal concepts, which allow the reduction of the necessary forces, have been developed by extending the function structure. These concepts have been experimentally investigated to identify their advantages and disadvantages.

scholarly journals Integrating Value Considerations in the Decision Making for the Design of Biorefineries

2020 ◽  
Vol 26 (6) ◽  
pp. 2927-2955
Author(s):  
Mar Palmeros Parada ◽  
Lotte Asveld ◽  
Patricia Osseweijer ◽  
John Alexander Posada
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Complex Systems ◽  
Research And Development ◽  
Design Process ◽  
Design Decision ◽  
Value Sensitive Design ◽  
Design Practice ◽  
Novel Approach ◽  
Design Alternatives ◽  
Biobased Production

AbstractBiobased production has been promoted as a sustainable alternative to fossil resources. However, controversies over its impact on sustainability highlight societal concerns, value tensions and uncertainties that have not been taken into account during its development. In this work, the consideration of stakeholders’ values in a biorefinery design project is investigated. Value sensitive design (VSD) is a promising approach to the design of technologies with consideration of stakeholders’ values, however, it is not directly applicable for complex systems like biorefineries. Therefore, some elements of VSD, such as the identification of relevant values and their connection to a technology’s features, are brought into biorefinery design practice. Midstream modulation (MM), an approach to promoting the consideration of societal aspects during research and development activities, is applied to promote reflection and value considerations during the design decision making. As result, it is shown that MM interventions during the design process led to new design alternatives in support of stakeholders' values, and allowed to recognize and respond to emerging value tensions within the scope of the project. In this way, the present work shows a novel approach for the technical investigation of VSD, especially for biorefineries. Also, based on this work it is argued that not only reflection, but also flexibility and openness are important for the application of VSD in the context of biorefinery design.

scholarly journals Explicating concepts in reasoning from function to form by two-step innovative abductions

2016 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 125-137 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ehud Kroll ◽  
Lauri Koskela
Keyword(s):  
Conceptual Design ◽  
Design Process ◽  
Abductive Reasoning ◽  
Parameter Analysis ◽  
Critical Examination ◽  
Functional Aspect ◽  
Specific Design ◽  
Design Processes ◽  
Step Process ◽  
Design Reasoning

AbstractThe mechanism of design reasoning from function to form is suggested to consist of a two-step inference of the innovative abduction type. First is an inference from a desired functional aspect to an idea, concept, or solution principle to satisfy the function. This is followed by a second innovative abduction, from the latest concept to form, structure, or mechanism. The intermediate entity in the logical reasoning, the concept, is thus made explicit, which is significant in following and understanding a specific design process, for educating designers, and to build a logic-based computational model of design. The idea of a two-step abductive reasoning process is developed from the critical examination of several propositions made by others. We use the notion of innovative abduction in design, as opposed to such abduction where the question is about selecting among known alternatives, and we adopt a previously proposed two-step process of abductive reasoning. However, our model is different in that the two abductions used follow the syllogistic pattern of innovative abduction. In addition to using a schematic example from the literature to demonstrate our derivation, we apply the model to an existing, empirically derived method of conceptual design called “parameter analysis” and use two examples of real design processes. The two synthetic steps of the method are shown to follow the proposed double innovative abduction scheme, and the design processes are presented as sequences of double abductions from function to concept and from concept to form, with a subsequent deductive evaluation step.

A model of the mechanical design process based on empirical data

1988 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 33-52 ◽  
Author(s):  
David G. Ullman ◽  
Thomas G. Dietterich ◽  
Larry A. Stauffer
Keyword(s):  
Problem Solving ◽  
Detailed Analysis ◽  
Conceptual Design ◽  
Design Process ◽  
Empirical Data ◽  
Mechanical Design ◽  
Level Of Detail ◽  
Cad Tools ◽  
Design Alternatives ◽  
Key Features

This paper describes the task/episode accumulation model (TEA model) of non-routine mechanical design, which was developed after detailed analysis of the audio and video protocols of five mechanical designers. The model is able to explain the behavior of designers at a much finer level of detail than previous models. The key features of the model are (a) the design is constructed by incrementally refining and patching an initial conceptual design, (b) design alternatives are not considered outside the boundaries of design episodes (which are short stretches of problem solving aimed at specific goals), (c) the design process is controlled locally, primarily at the level of individual episodes. Among the implications of the model are the following: (a) CAD tools should be extended to represent the state of the design at more abstract levels, (b) CAD tools should help the designer manage constraints, and (c) CAD tools should be designed to give cognitive support to the designer.

An Advisory Conceptual Design Tool for Mechanical Transmission Systems

1994 ◽  
Author(s):  
C. P. Huang ◽  
F. W. Liou ◽  
J. J. Malyamakkil ◽  
W. F. Lu
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Expert System ◽  
Conceptual Design ◽  
Design Process ◽  
Design Tool ◽  
Mechanical Transmission ◽  
Transmission Systems ◽  
Knowledge Based System ◽  
Knowledge Based ◽  
Packaging Machine

Abstract This paper presents an advisory conceptual design tool for mechanical transmission systems. Space consideration was taken into account during the design process. A prototype function tree was built in the form of knowledge-based system to transfer a designer’s idea into a set of mechanical components. An advisory expert system was also developed to help a designer in decision making. As an example, a packaging machine is designed using the developed system.

Approach to system functional requirements extraction and methods for its implementation based on the design of user activities in the interface using architectural schemes

2021 ◽  
pp. 100-105
Author(s):  
A.N. Belikov ◽  
◽  
S.A. Belikova
Keyword(s):  
Information Systems ◽  
Natural Language ◽  
Design Process ◽  
Process Model ◽  
Main Idea ◽  
Direct Interaction ◽  
Functional Requirements ◽  
End User ◽  
System Developer ◽  
Statistical Studies

The existing approach to requirements extraction is that the requirements are formed by the system developer through direct interaction with the customer using a number of methods (for example, interviewing; prototyping; analysis of use cases; user stories; seminars, etc.). In this case, most often the requirements are formed by the developer himself, taking into account the opinion of the customer’s representative. The disadvantage of the existing approach is the problem of loss of knowledge transferred from the customer’s representatives to the developer, which results in the failure of projects, which is recorded by the existing statistics. As statistical studies show, more than half of projects for the creation of information systems (IS) are failures or require changes (in terms of budget, time and customer satisfaction). In modern research in the field of__ design and development of information systems, there is a tendency to involve the end user (customer) in the design process. To develop this idea, an approach is proposed to involve the user in the process of extracting requirements, where the developer will no longer be the person forming the requirements. The main idea of the approach is to develop special tools that allow you to independently transform the customer’s natural language into such a form of representation of the model of the process of solving professional problems, from which an interface will be built, which will allow extracting functional requirements from the unity (process model and interface).

A Study of the Information Handling Behavior of Designers During Conceptual Design

1994 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vinod Baya ◽  
Larry J. Leifer
Keyword(s):  
Experimental Study ◽  
Social Work ◽  
Work Environment ◽  
Conceptual Design ◽  
Design Process ◽  
Verbal Protocol ◽  
Amount Of Information ◽  
Information Handling ◽  
Tools And Methods

Abstract The research reported in this paper examines the design process from an informational perspective. The study is based on the premise that there is a need to understand and formalize the information generating, accessing and analyzing behavior of designers in order to build tools and methods which can be smoothly integrated with their technical and social work environment. Results from an experimental study, conducted using the verbal protocol method, are discussed. A measure for the amount of information designers handle has been explored. A framework for analyzing the information handling behavior of designers is also presented.

Recommending Relevant Tutorial Fragments for API-Related Natural Language Questions

2021 ◽  
Vol 31 (09) ◽  
pp. 1251-1275
Author(s):  
Di Wu ◽  
Xiao-Yuan Jing ◽  
Haowen Chen ◽  
Xiaohui Kong ◽  
Jifeng Xuan
Keyword(s):  
Natural Language ◽  
State Of The Art ◽  
Metric Learning ◽  
Application Programming Interface ◽  
Manual Annotation ◽  
Candidate List ◽  
Novel Approach ◽  
Application Programming ◽  
Programming Interface ◽  
Reciprocal Rank

Application Programming Interface (API) tutorial is an important API learning resource. To help developers learn APIs, an API tutorial is often split into a number of consecutive units that describe the same topic (i.e. tutorial fragment). We regard a tutorial fragment explaining an API as a relevant fragment of the API. Automatically recommending relevant tutorial fragments can help developers learn how to use an API. However, existing approaches often employ supervised or unsupervised manner to recommend relevant fragments, which suffers from much manual annotation effort or inaccurate recommended results. Furthermore, these approaches only support developers to input exact API names. In practice, developers often do not know which APIs to use so that they are more likely to use natural language to describe API-related questions. In this paper, we propose a novel approach, called Tutorial Fragment Recommendation (TuFraRec), to effectively recommend relevant tutorial fragments for API-related natural language questions, without much manual annotation effort. For an API tutorial, we split it into fragments and extract APIs from each fragment to build API-fragment pairs. Given a question, TuFraRec first generates several clarification APIs that are related to the question. We use clarification APIs and API-fragment pairs to construct candidate API-fragment pairs. Then, we design a semi-supervised metric learning (SML)-based model to find relevant API-fragment pairs from the candidate list, which can work well with a few labeled API-fragment pairs and a large number of unlabeled API-fragment pairs. In this way, the manual effort for labeling the relevance of API-fragment pairs can be reduced. Finally, we sort and recommend relevant API-fragment pairs based on the recommended strategy. We evaluate TuFraRec on 200 API-related natural language questions and two public tutorial datasets (Java and Android). The results demonstrate that on average TuFraRec improves NDCG@5 by 0.06 and 0.09, and improves Mean Reciprocal Rank (MRR) by 0.07 and 0.09 on two tutorial datasets as compared with the state-of-the-art approach.

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