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PhD Defence Jos de Lange

Information as a workpiece: an architecture for content-driven design support

Jos de Lange is a PhD student in the research group Design Production & Management (DPM). His supervisors are prof.dr.ir. F.J.A.M. van Houten and prof.dr.ir. R. ten Klooster from the faculty Engineering Technology (ET). 

This thesis contributes to the field of Design Theory and Methodology (DTM) with a design support paradigm that originates in the evolving product definition. In DTM, this product definition is widely accepted as being the common purpose of development cycles. Also, information management is recognized as an important aspect in documenting both the evolvement and definition of the product. These elements, however, have not yet found an application as the footing for offering design support.

The overall theme of the research as described in this thesis is depicted as ‘design support based on information management for design theory and methodology’. This results in a proposal, in the form of an architecture, for so-called content-driven design support. This induces new (design support) functionalities and approaches for this evolving product definition, in which information is seen as the workpiece of the development cycle.

With this, the base for the content-driven design support becomes the explicitly available information that product developers use and engender during the development cycle (e.g. concepts, drawings, cad-models, simulations, minutes, reports). In other words, the design support closely aligns with the daily practise of product development and the prevalence of the many outcomes stemming from the myriad activities involved.

To edify the proposed architecture from the initial inspiration to focus on the evolving information content, the thesis distinguishes five main components: an analysis on design support for product development, an information perspective on product development; a requirement specification; the solution principles and the previously mentioned architecture.

The analysis on product development addresses its characteristics as well as examples of practise and a literature review on available design support. The main outcome of this analysis is that current design support approaches are pre-dominantly based on generalised and aggregated insights in product development cycles rather than on actual design practise. From this, the information-value axiom “Information is the carrier of all (added) value in and of a product development cycle” is devised as the alternative starting point for reasoning about design support.

Based on the axiom a type of design support is proposed that is induced by the information generated during the actual design practise. This requires a different, information-based perspective on product development. Consequently, focus is first put on deconstructing the notion product development into its core concepts and essential proceedings. The resulting building blocks, perspectives and aims initiate a different idea of how design support can be offered. Contextualising the information perspective on product development is done by means of a new reference model.

One of the main contributions of this reference model is that it allows to deal with decisions in a new manner. For this, the decision impact model is established. This model links any decision back to the information workpiece leading to the following stated purpose: employ the evolving information content to explore the uncertain solution space and explicate possible consequences of development decisions in order to initiate, direct and facilitate effective and efficient decision making.

Improving decision making is only relevant if the right decisions are addressed. The content-driven design support approach highly values the expertise of product developers in reaching both deterministic and non-deterministic decision making. For this reason, two underlying principles are addressed. Firstly, the collection of information concerning the evolving product definition needs to be established and needs to be made explicitly accessible as a ‘workpiece’ for the product development team. Secondly, an interface between this information and the tools needed to realise the envisaged design support has to be available as a ‘workbench’ for the product developer – from his or her own perspective.

The architecture synthesises all previously mentioned aspects into a blueprint for developing content-driven design support. This architecture exhibits the required core functionalities of the content-driven design support as well as the required core control principles.

Before addressing any type of implementation, the main approach must be validated. After all, it should be worthwhile to justify the (potentially enormous) effort that can be involved in actually implementing the design support approach. Consequently, the solution direction aims to demonstrate and test the validity of the chosen information perspective on design support. The architecture summarizes all aspects and defines the design proposal for a system based on content-driven design support. This architecture should not be seen as the final word on the matter or as the decisive end-result ready for use in daily practise. Rather, it is intended as an intermediate result that offers a solid base on which information-induced design support applications can be further developed and explored.

For this thesis, such an implementation is out of scope as it encompasses an entire new development trajectory. Such an implementation would not do justice to the generic nature of the architecture and the effort required to develop such a singular instantiation would be disproportionate to its added value in validating the new approach. Instead of using implementation as validation, a number of scenarios is introduced that simultaneously serve as examples and tests of how the architecture can be employed. From these scenarios preliminary requirements for potential implementation trajectories are deduced. This gives insight in the potentialities of the architecture, but it foremost provides an information basis on which developers – the experts – can better reach the right decisions on the appropriate issues. It allows them to fully exploit their creativity and communication skills to – conjointly with experts from different domains – establish the best implementation (approach) for the situation at hand. As such, it is the intention to use the architecture as the workbench, on which the evolving information content can become the effective and efficient implementation.