Introduction
Within the Department of Design, Production and Management at the University of Twente (Faculty of Engineering Technology), the research cluster Information driven Product Development & Engineering aims to develop method(ologie)s, tools and techniques to support decision-making in the broad field of product development and engineering. In this, we reason from the information content that underlies, guides and drives decision making in all phases and aspects of the life cycle of the product. Here, the notion 'product' is interpreted in its broadest sense, reasoning from one-off to mass-produced products, and from packaging via product-service systems to production environments.
The reason to focus on the information content that drives development cycles is based on the observation that process-oriented ways of guiding development processes simply cannot meet the demands and increasing complexity of such trajectories. Moreover, reasoning from the information content allows for more effective and efficient ways of dealing with the many different perspectives of all actors and stakeholders involved. At the same time, digitalisation allows for profound ways of interpreting, combining, and aggregating the information from all fields of expertise involved, thus making the information content, or product definition, the actual 'workpiece' in development cycles.
Inherent to all development cycles are the volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity of all processes, perspectives and information involved. Additionally, all development and engineering projects intrinsically strive to reach multiple goals concurrently ('polytelie'), balancing not only time, cost and quality, but also e.g., sustainability, safety, customisation opportunities, development capabilities, and technological risks, all for an overall product portfolio. In our research we do not aim to mitigate polytelie and incertitudes; we rather incorporate them as incentives in development and engineering.