The Architect's Collaborator: Toward Intelligent Tools for Conceptual Design

In early stages of architectural design, as in other design domains, the language used is often very abstract. In architectural design, for example, architects and their clients use experiential terms such as "private" or "open" to describe spaces. If we are to build programs that can help designers during this early-stage design, we must give those programs the capability to deal with concepts on the level of such abstractions. The work reported in this thesis sought to do that, focusing on two key questions: How are abstract terms such as "private" and "open" translated into physical form? How might one build a tool to assist designers with this process? The Architect's Collaborator (TAC) was built to explore these issues. It is a design assistant that supports iterative design refinement, and that represents and reasons about how experiential qualities are manifested in physical form. Given a starting design and a set of design goals, TAC explores the space of possible designs in search of solutions that satisfy the goals. It employs a strategy we've called dependency-directed redesign: it evaluates a design with respect to a set of goals, then uses an explanation of the evaluation to guide proposal and refinement of repair suggestions; it then carries out the repair suggestions to create new designs. A series of experiments was run to study TAC's behavior. Issues of control structure, goal set size, goal order, and modification operator capabilities were explored. In addition, TAC's use as a design assistant was studied in an experiment using a house in the process of being redesigned. TAC's use as an analysis tool was studied in an experiment using Frank Lloyd Wright's Prairie houses.

Performance-Driven Microfabrication-Oriented Methodology for MEMS Conceptual Design with Application in Microfluidic Device Design

Performance and manufacturability are two important issues that must be taken into account during MEMS design. Existing MEMS design models or systems follow a process-driven design paradigm, that is, design starts from the specification of process sequence or the customization of foundry-ready process template. There has been essentially no methodology or model that supports generic, high-level design synthesis for MEMS conceptual design. As a result, there lacks a basis for specifying the initial process sequences. To address this problem, this paper proposes a performance-driven, microfabrication-oriented methodology for MEMS conceptual design. A unified behaviour representation method is proposed which incorporates information of both physical interactions and chemical/biological/other reactions. Based on this method, a behavioural process based design synthesis model is proposed, which exploits multidisciplinary phenomena for design solutions, including both the structural components and their configuration for the MEMS device, as well as the necessary substances for the chemical/biological/other reactions. The model supports both forward and backward synthetic search for suitable phenomena. To ensure manufacturability, a strategy of using microfabrication-oriented phenomena as design knowledge is proposed, where the phenomena are developed from existing MEMS devices that have associated MEMS-specific microfabrication processes or foundry-ready process templates. To test the applicability of the proposed methodology, the paper also studies microfluidic device design and uses a micro-pump design for the case study.

Measuring Value in Product Development

“What is value in product development?” is the key question of this paper. The answer is critical to the creation of lean in product development. By knowing how much value is added by product development (PD) activities, decisions can be more rationally made about how to allocate resources, such as time and money. In order to apply the principles of Lean Thinking and remove waste from the product development system, value must be precisely defined. Unfortunately, value is a complex entity that is composed of many dimensions and has thus far eluded definition on a local level. For this reason, research has been initiated on “Measuring Value in Product Development.” This paper serves as an introduction to this research. It presents the current understanding of value in PD, the critical questions involved, and a specific research design to guide the development of a methodology for measuring value. Work in PD value currently focuses on either high-level perspectives on value, or detailed looks at the attributes that value might have locally in the PD process. Models that attempt to capture value in PD are reviewed. These methods, however, do not capture the depth necessary to allow for application. A methodology is needed to evaluate activities on a local level to determine the amount of value they add and their sensitivity with respect to performance, cost, time, and risk. Two conceptual tools are proposed. The first is a conceptual framework for value creation in PD, referred to here as the Value Creation Model. The second tool is the Value-Activity Map, which shows the relationships between specific activities and value attributes. These maps will allow a better understanding of the development of value in PD, will facilitate comparison of value development between separate projects, and will provide the information necessary to adapt process analysis tools (such as DSM) to consider value. The key questions that this research entails are: · What are the primary attributes of lifecycle value within PD? · How can one model the creation of value in a specific PD process? · Can a useful methodology be developed to quantify value in PD processes? · What are the tools necessary for application? · What PD metrics will be integrated with the necessary tools? The research milestones are: · Collection of value attributes and activities (September, 200) · Development of methodology of value-activity association (October, 2000) · Testing and refinement of the methodology (January, 2001) · Tool Development (March, 2001) · Present findings at July INCOSE conference (April, 2001) · Deliver thesis that captures a formalized methodology for defining value in PD (including LEM data sheets) (June, 2001) The research design aims for the development of two primary deliverables: a methodology to guide the incorporation of value, and a product development tool that will allow direct application.