Antecedence and consequence in design rationale systems

Abstract

Identification of latent or unarticulated customer and other stakeholder needs has been a significant barrier to improving the efficiency and effectiveness of the front-end phase of new product development processes. In-depth determination of stakeholder needs entails analysis of their intentions; the overall aim of the work reported in this article is to establish a framework of intentional analysis, and its associated methods and techniques for improving traceability of design practice during the early phases of the design process. The specific aim of this article is to present a conceptual framework for design rationale systems. The framework built upon the cross-fertilization of approaches and methods drawn from systems engineering and philosophy, focussing on the notions of antecedence and consequence. It was developed in the course of tackling design problems originating in industrial contexts. The methods developed were thus evaluated, updated, and refined in real applications. Two application cases are described that have been drawn from the aerospace and power sectors, respectively. The applications showed that the framework's central antecedent/consequent scheme provides a cell from which to develop either a history of actual successive changes, or a tree of alternative possible projected designs.

A Novel Patent Knowledge Extraction Method for Innovative Design

“…As shown in Fig. 5, based on the DRV shown in Expression (13), and the TW dictionaries, DR sentences can be identified from the target sentence list, and the relevant DR entities, such as literature, artifacts, intents, can be extracted with the aid of the NLP syntactic parsers. Table 1 is some instance sentences, and related DRV_TWs and their weight indexes.…”

“…DR is important design knowledge about the design process, which includes issues, intents, alternatives, pros and cons of the design. DR plays a very important role in engineering design, such as facilitating collaborative design [6], [7], [8], [9], [10], [11], helping designers with personal knowledge management, assisting in relevant education and training [12], implementing root cause analysis to track design failures [13], [14]. If DR could be automatically extracted from patent documents and formally stored, it would be of great value to designers, because the extracted DR can inspire innovative designs.…”

Facilitating design communication through engineering information traceability

“…Design rationale capturing tools are beginning to be accepted in industry, for example, the Design Rationale Editor (Bracewell et al, 2007). Agouridas and Simons (2008) argue that identification of latent or unarticulated customer and other stakeholder needs has been a significant barrier to improving the efficiency and effectiveness of the front-end phase of new product development processes. An in-depth determination of stakeholder needs entails analysis of their intentions; the overall aim of the work reported in this article is to establish a framework of intentional analysis and its associated methods and techniques to improve the traceability of design practice during the early phases of the design process.…”