Sequence Of Design Activities Research Articles

A New QFD-CE Method for Considering the Concept of Sustainable Development and Circular Economy

The idea of sustainable development (SD) forces companies to combine the quality development of products with the simultaneous care of the natural environment. These actions should start with the product design process. The aim of the study was to create a modified method of Quality Function Development (QFD-CE), which will support the design of new products or improve the existing products on the market. In the proposed method (QFD-CE), the method integrates techniques such as: SMARTER method, brainstorming (BM), the method of selecting a team of experts, kinship diagram, fixed sum scale, and Likert scale. A novelty compared to the traditional QFD methodology is that design goals are set not only based on customer expectations, but also considering the impact on the natural environment. The originality of this proposition comes to the practical inclusion of including sustainability development criteria. The proposed method can be used in companies that design new products and are focused on caring for the natural environment. The QFD-CE method test method was performed for photovoltaic panels (PV). As part of the proposed QFD-CE method, the sequence of design activities was determined so that they meet customer expectations and can be simultaneously implemented according to the idea of SD. This method can be used for any product, mainly those that have a significant impact on the natural environment.

Modelling Trade Contractor Information Production

Design management research usually deals with the processes within the professional design team and yet, in the UK, the volume of the total project information produced by the specialist trade contractors equals or exceeds that produced by the design team. There is a need to understand the scale of this production task and to plan and manage it accordingly. The model of the process on which the plan is to be based, while generic, must be sufficiently robust to cover the majority of instances. An approach using design elements, in sufficient depth to possibly develop tools for a predictive model of the process, is described. The starting point is that each construction element and its components have a generic sequence of design activities. Specific requirements tailor the element's application to the building. Then there are the constraints produced due to the interaction with other elements. Therefore, the selection of a component within the element may impose a set of constraints that will affect the choice of other design elements. Thus, a design decision can be seen as an interrelated element—constraint—element (ECE) sub-net. To illustrate this approach, an example of the process within precast concrete cladding has been used.

A dynamic multi-view product model to share product behaviours among designers: how process model adds semantic to the behaviour paradigm

In the context of extended enterprise, models to share information about product definition during the design stage are often under focus. In this paper, the author describes a Product-Process-Organisation integrated model. The aim of this model is to share a common representation of the product, the sequence of design activities, the company organisation, supporting this development process and the relationship among the previous objects. This system is dedicated to share information among the designers from various skills and know-how, who model products in various ways. Then the proposed model integrates the various behaviours of the product at any stage of its lifecycle. Product behaviour depends on the expert point of view: it may be either required or deduced from an expert analysis. This paper discusses the duality between the design development process and the product life-cycle and deals with the behavioural concepts during the development process.

A software system for specifying design procedures

A software system for producing a systematic and logical sequence of design activities has been produced. The resulting sequence is aimed to indicate a logical progression of events that should be carried out within a particular design domain (for example, the design of a particular product such as a machine sub-assembly, or an area of design such as the specification of tolerances). The purpose of the scheme is to specify a design route that could subsequently be used by less-skilled design personnel, or as the basis for construction of a design manual or a specific piece of computer-aided design software. The present software is generic so that it can be applied to a wide variety of design domains. In this paper, the system is described, and examples of use presented. Tests of the system are discussed and it is concluded that the methodology provides the basis of a tool for planning a design process.