Supporting the bottom-up evolution of the engineering design process
Douglas Cunningham · 1998
Academe and industry alike increasingly acknowledge that the interaction and coordination mechanisms of the design process are becoming ever more complicated as projects grow in size and global reach. Moreover, the vast and changing numbers of components, tools, and methods which engineers have to choose from compound the problem and often make it intractable. Since the social activities drive the analytical activities of engineering design, such negative impacts on the design process will have correspondingly negative impacts on the design product. The boon of computers has promised to solve these ills. But the results are insufficient at best. Indeed, some researchers have linked the increasing investments in information technology and the stagnation of productivity growth. While many researchers in the software development industry acknowledge the problem and attempt to address it through improved participatory design techniques, most have failed to recognize the dynamic, evolving needs of the architects of the design process, the engineers. The dynamic nature of design imposes new demands which have not been met by the software industry. That is, support tools for engineers must be allowed to evolve as the engineers' needs evolve. While limited progress has been made in building rapid prototyping environments for creating new applications, the intention of these systems is for developers to build support tools for target users. For engineers, though, support requirements will change in an unpredictable and unknown fashion. The engineer can no more predict what tool will be required next week than he can forecast the design itself. Practices and tools evolve as the problem and solution are jointly defined. Hence, the engineer must be able to construct tools as they are needed. We present here a system, called n-dim, for managing the interrelationships of design information and which provides means for the system itself to be customized for a particular requirement. Furthermore, we describe three tools which have been developed with the goal of supporting engineers in the need-based customization of n-dim when their interaction and coordination of project information with others demands it.