Underlying design motivations in design methods and outcomes
Year: 2017
Editor: Anja Maier, Stanko Škec, Harrison Kim, Michael Kokkolaras, Josef Oehmen, Georges Fadel, Filippo Salustri, Mike Van der Loos
Author: Turner, Cameron; Agyemang, Malena
Series: ICED
Institution: Clemson University, United States of America
Section: Human Behaviour in Design
Page(s): 469-478
ISBN: 978-1-904670-96-4
ISSN: 2220-4342
Abstract
Design teams approach design problems with a set of explicit requirements derived from the problem, but also bring a number of implicit design requirements to the problem through the culture within which they work. We hypothesized that these influences affect how design teams approach design problems, and in particular, how teams define requirements and apply analogies to develop their designs. In this paper, we used a multi-section senior design course to place teams working on similar design projects for real customers in a situation where they were subjected to a cultural bias between a Design for Manufacture and Assembly culture versus a Design for Environment culture by the instructors of each section. During the class, the emergence of design requirements related to these biases were noted during design reviews. End of semester surveys further measured the perceived student significance of these cultural differences, as well as differences in how students used design analogies throughout their design projects. Based on the data collected, differences in design culture affect the design process and methods used by the design teams.
Keywords: Design for X (DfX), Decision making, Design process, Human behaviour in design