Design Thinking to Enhance Requirements Analysis in Systems Engineering

Abstract

Systems engineering (SE) is a general methodological approach that includes all relevant activities to design, develop and verify a system. This work was based on the need to enhance the integration of the customer needs into the design phases of SE. A joint methodology was proposed integrating the SE approach with the Design Thinking (DT). An analysis was conducted as part of a case study proposed by IBM Corporation for the development of a security system for a building. The results confirm that the insertion of the DT in the SE has a significant impact on the generation of concept solutions.

New Product Development Process for Medtech Combination Products

“…Studies show that mixing the unstructured DT techniques with the structured SE thinking can be jointly applied in innovative system development. This is especially relevant for the specification and development of concept solutions (Batista et al, 2020), since their synergy effect appears useful for acquiring a broader understanding as well as refining and reframing a problem (Sjøkvist and Kjørstad, 2019;Watanabe et al, 2017), need-finding (Sjøkvist and Kjørstad, 2019;Zhao, 2015), discovering requirements and functions (Zhao, 2015), especially those related to human values and usability and to create solutions that satisfy the emotional need of the stakeholders (Sjøkvist and Kjørstad, 2019), solve ill-defined problems (Tomita et al, 2017). One major benefit of using DT as methodological guidelines to perform early SE activities is to propose participative workshops that boost customer engagement.…”

Value Analysis to Improve System Architecting

“…These observations conducted us to determine some limits of the SE view of stakeholders-centered system as the fact that involvement of Stakeholders seem to be limited by the method used. This is supported by the fact that other work has been carried out to address this lack of Stakeholder involvement and rapid iterations as described by (Batista, Hassan and Bonjour, 2020). However, we will study the architecting phase, which interests us the most because of its potential impact on the entire lifecycle and we will focus on the requirements of Stakeholders and the indicators used.…”

“…We could say that there is a lack of hindsight on the approaches, techniques and methods that would be able to implement the SE, whether in the understanding of the needs, the integration of the Stakeholders, the optimization of the perceived value of systems, the integration of sustainability... These lines of research seem particularly interesting to us for the current and future evolutions of the approaches allowing to integrate social and environmental dimensions in the decision-making processes from the upstream phases of the design of complex systems.. For example, a comparative work could be carried out between the Design Thinking approaches undertaken by (Batista, Hassan and Bonjour, 2020) and our works based on Value Analysis.…”