Making sense of engineering design review activities

Abstract

Engineering design reviews, which take place at predetermined phases of the product development process, are fundamental elements for the evaluation and control of engineering activities. These meetings are also acknowledged as unique opportunities for all the parties involved to share information about the product and related engineering processes. For product development teams, the knowledge generated during a design review is not as secondary as it may seem; key design decisions, design experiences, and associated rationale are frequently made explicit. Useful work has been carried out on the design review process itself, but little work has been undertaken about the detailed content of the meeting activity; it is argued that understanding the transactions that take place during a meeting is critical to building an effective knowledgeoriented recording strategy. To this effect, an extensive research program based on case studies in the aerospace engineering domain has been carried out. The work reported in this paper focuses on a set of tools and methods developed to characterize and analyze in depth the transactions observed during a number of case studies. The first methodology developed, the transcript coding scheme, uses an intelligent segmentation of meeting discourse transcriptions. The second approach, which bypasses the time consuming transcribing operation, is based on a meeting capture template developed to enable a meeting observer to record the transactions as the meeting takes place. A third method, the information mapping technique, has also been developed to interpret the case study data in terms of decisions, actions, rationale, and lessons learned, effectively generating qualitative measures of the information lost in the formal records of design reviews. Overall, the results generated by the set of tools presented in this paper have fostered a practical strategy for the knowledge intensive capture of the contents of design reviews. The concluding remarks also discuss possible enhancements to the meeting analysis tools presented in this paper and future work aimed at the development of a computer supported capture software for design reviews.

A comparison of designer activity using core design situations in the laboratory and practice

“…For ideation 10 only a one code was added to examine idea generation based on Howard et al (2010). Finally, for the design review situation codes were added to identify artefact use based on Huet et al (2007).Additional refinement was carried out to ensure the codes were relevant for the study tasks and context. All the stage specific codes are defined in Table 4.…”

Rock Crusher Upgrade Business from a PLM Perspective

“…Engineering design reviews (see e.g. Huet et al 2007) are one of the most important application areas of virtual prototyping. However, the majority of the published virtual prototyping examples are related to new product development, which is not really the case, in this research.…”

Approaches to Coaching Students in Design Reviews

“…Key functions of coaching emphasize directing students to improve design reasoning (Ball & Christensen, 2016;Dong, Garbuio & Lovallo, 2016), offering advice in making explicit design decisions with associated rationales and consequences (Huet et al, 2007), monitoring and intervening with respect to processes and guidelines (Reich et al, 2014), and providing opportunities for students to fail, succeed, and take ownership in design decisions (Daly & Yilmaz, 2016). Coaches also help students form a design thinking mindset (Dannels, Gaffney & Martin, 2008) and navigate the non-trivial aspects of learning to use disciplinary knowledge in context (Wolmarans, 2016).…”

“…Variations include informal critique sessions between a teacher and student or a few students on a team, group review sessions where all students participate actively or passively in critiques of all student projects, and juried assessments where students present final work to a jury of invited professionals (Goldschmidt, Hochman & Dafni, 2010;Oh et al, 2012). In comparison, engineering design reviews are often scheduled meetings that emphasize information sharing, feedback, and obtaining approval to move on to the next step in the process (Cummings et al, 2016;Huet et al, 2007). In professional settings, design reviews emphasize engaging multiple stakeholders in evaluating a design artifact, verifying conformance to standards or values, and approving further progress (Sonalkar, Mabongunje & Leifer, 2016).…”

“…Design reviews or critiques are a common pedagogy for helping learners in any discipline develop and demonstrate design expertise (Dym, Agogino, Eris, Frey & Leifer, 2005;Huet, Culley, McMahon & Fortin, 2007;Goldschmidt, 2002), although their structure and content may vary across disciplines (Adams, 2016a). Many describe the practice of moving from desk to desk explaining what is right and wrong with student work as the "bread and butter" of design training (Goldschmidt, Casakin, Avidan & Ronen, 2014) and a central feature of preparing professionals as reflective practitioners (Schön, 1993).…”