IC-Behavior: An interdisciplinary taxonomy of behaviors

Academic disciplines are often organized according to the behaviors they examine. While most research on a behavior tends to exist within one discipline, some behaviors are examined by multiple disciplines. Better understanding of behaviors and their relationships should enable knowledge transfer across disciplines and theories, thereby dramatically improving the behavioral knowledge base. We propose a taxonomy built on the World Health Organization’s International Classification of Functioning, Disability, and Health (ICF), but design the taxonomy as a stand-alone extension rather than an improvement to ICF. Behaviors considered important enough to serve as the dependent variable in articles accepted for publication in top journals were extracted from nine different behavioral and social disciplines. A six-step development and validation process was employed, leading to the final taxonomy. A hierarchy of behaviors under the top banner of Engaging in activities/participating, reflective of ICF’s D. hierarchy was constructed with eight immediate domains addressing behaviors ranging from learning, exercising, self-care, and substance use. The resulting International Classification of Behaviors (IC-Behavior), provides a behavior taxonomy targeted towards the interdisciplinary integration of nomological networks relevant to behavioral theories. While IC-Behavior has been labeled v.1.0 to communicate that it is by no means an endpoint, it has empirically shown to provide flexibility for the addition of new behaviors and is tested in the health domain.

Computable Dynamic Design Repository for Product Data Representation

The product representation for storing design information presented in this paper is based on a dynamic object-oriented data model. This model stores design data as they are generated during design in a computable format, as well as supports case-based reasoning and sharing of data among all design teams. This model represents each entity in the product as a generic container that encompasses its form, function, behavior, taxonomy, composition and relationships. Different features can be added dynamically, i.e. during run time, to the container as needed. The model integrates multiple views of various design teams, supports dynamic design evolution and exploration, and is extensible. Finally, the model is computable because it provides means of establishing quantitative and qualitative relationships between model parameters and entities. Any subsequent change of related model parameters or entities will cause an automatic controlled propagation of changes to take place in dependent parameters and entities.