An Approach to Represent and Communicate Product or System Design Ideas at the Fuzzy-Front End of the Design Process

Eliab Opiyo

doi:10.3390/systems4010008

Abstract

The primary challenge underscored and dealt with was how to represent the product’s or system’s use environment and processes and to communicate ideas and envisaged use contexts effectively at the fuzzy-front early stages of the design process. The work focused specifically on complex products or systems with physical, software and/or cyber components, and the question was how to represent, e.g., the operations of the product or system and the interactions between the user and the product or system betimes in the period between when an opportunity for a new product or system is first considered, and when the idea is judged to be ready to enter formal development. Several approaches are currently being used to express and to communicate ideas at the conceptualization, embodiment, and detail design stages of the design process, but none of them address the challenge described above. We therefore adapted and extended the abstract prototyping concept to allow for total representation of ideas, as well as of use environments and processes early on. Extended abstract prototyping (Ext-AP) entails using combinations of low and high-fidelity prototyping techniques to create cognitive virtual representations, which represent and help designers to express ideas and use contexts—namely, what complex product or system would be like, and how its users would interact with it. Real-world product development case studies have been used to demonstrate how the Ext-AP technique can be put into practice. One of the main observations from the application case studies is that the Ext-AP technique enabled the subjects to express ideas and use contexts more effectively early on. In addition, the extended abstract prototypes (Ext-APs) offered a low cost, yet effective solution for expressing ideas, representing concepts and using contexts, and allowed the subjects to think divergently, make associations, easily and quickly construct, combine, and evaluate alternatives, and work together on multiple ideas simultaneously.

Highlights

The designers’ understanding of what the designed product or system should be like and how it should function and interact with the user and its environment is vital for solving the underlying engineering design problems, achieving quality, and for the success of the eventual product or system in the marketplace
The very fact that the existing virtual and physical prototyping approaches do not entail prototyping of the use environment or how the product or system would interact with the end user limits their effectiveness in terms of supporting the designer, e.g., in keeping an eye on the use environment and processes whilst making associations, constructing, combining, and evaluating alternatives, or when working on multiple ideas
We describe the fundamentals of abstract of the extent to which these fuzzy-front end stage in-process deliverables meet various quality prototyping in the following subsections

Summary

Introduction

The designers’ understanding of what the designed product or system should be like and how it should function and interact with the user and its environment is vital for solving the underlying engineering design problems, achieving quality, and for the success of the eventual product or system in the marketplace. It is broadly known that problem-solving in engineering design in particular requires collective rational analysis of the needs, requirements, and constraints, synthesis of solutions to the problems, and sensible evaluation of design concepts [1,2,3]. There is a need for a vigorous and effective technique to support representation and expression of ideas and collaboration in order to achieve better understanding of the products or systems and use contexts. The challenge we tackled was how to represent the ideas and the envisaged use processes and interactions with the end user—including the environment in which the product or system will operate, in the period between when an opportunity for a new product or system is first considered, and when the idea is judged to be ready to enter formal development

Objectives

Methods

Findings

Discussion

Conclusion