Abstract
Traditional aerospace design methods offer quick and efficient ways to generate new designs, but such that often resemble previous ones. For truly innovative design, however, a different approach is needed. This paper suggests that a general conceptual design method called ‘parameter analysis’ (PA) may be used for teaching and practicing innovative aerospace design. To support this proposition, we investigate four diverse, innovative and unique case studies, all carried out by very experienced aerospace designers: the ‘dam busting’ bouncing bomb of World War II, the Gossamer Condor human-powered plane of the 1970s, the asymmetric Boomerang twin-engine plane of the 1990s and the SpaceShipOne suborbital spacecraft of the early 2000s. The paper elaborates on how the methodology of case-study research has been adapted and applied to provide the evidence supporting the research hypothesis, and presents the results of analyzing the case studies. It shows that the expert aerospace designers followed a thought process similar to PA, even if unknowingly, where the similarity was measured by counting the number of PA characteristics that could be shown to exist in the case studies. Advantages and limitations of the research methodology are also discussed.
Highlights
Motivation: the need for a method to design innovative productsA debate exists regarding the teaching and practicing of engineering design methods: Which is the ‘most correct’ method? Are some methods more suitable for teaching to novices and others that are practiced by accomplished designers? Do experts use structured methods or intuition and experience? Should the taught design methods be general or discipline-specific? Is there a preferred method when it comes to highly innovative design tasks, as opposed to more routine design?
This paper investigated, through case studies, whether the parameter analysis’ (PA) method of conceptual design is suitable to aerospace engineering
It showed that expert designers in this field, when called upon designing highly innovative solutions, use a thought process that shares many characteristics with PA
Summary
A debate exists regarding the teaching and practicing of engineering design methods: Which is the ‘most correct’ method? Are some methods more suitable for teaching to novices and others that are practiced by accomplished designers? Do experts use structured methods or intuition and experience? Should the taught design methods be general or discipline-specific? Is there a preferred method when it comes to highly innovative design tasks, as opposed to more routine design?. Cross (2006) describes the study of three innovative designs by experts – engineering, product and race car designers He concludes that they all identify quickly the crux of the design task at the conceptual level, generate an approach to solve it, examine their solution and modify it. Lawson (2005), for example, notes that designers often use solutionfocused rather than problem-focused strategies, and that they quickly develop a rough idea for the most significant elements of the solution, which he calls the ‘primary generator’ idea This kind of research has undoubtedly contributed significantly to our understanding of human thinking in design, it falls short when it comes to translating the findings to a prescriptive model of the design process that can be taught and practiced. The implication of finding empirical evidence for this hypothesis is that PA may be claimed to be suitable for teaching and practicing innovative aerospace conceptual design in situations of radical, breakthrough innovation
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