Informal Graphics For Conceptual Design

Engineers who work in innovative design spaces have very different CAD and graphics needs than those who work in more conventional design spaces. We propose to develop ideas about the graphical communication needs for conceptual design. This paper will illustrate what we mean by describing a few new methods such as feature-based sketching, and edited/annotated photos. We will also discuss preliminary trials using new technologies such as digital ink pens and tablets that occurred in late 2004. Formal trials will take place in the spring of 2005 in the context of a program offering an introductory engineering design course to about one thousand students a year and several upper division courses in innovative and global design. Our approach is an exploration of what we view as a new paradigm in engineering design graphics: informal techniques of graphical communication. While our approach is exploratory, we hope that this concept can help organize a new family of techniques and ideas in the engineering design graphics community. Some key concepts we deploy are conceptual design, informal graphics, rapid graphical communication, and optimal ignorance in the graphical communication process. The Design Process The idea that engineering design is a process, or series of processes, rather than problem solving using analysis and good idea or two, is the most significant development in design over the last few decades. Further, this approach to design may be fruitfully applied in all fields of engineering. Perhaps no scholars deserve more credit for this development than Pahl and Beitz in Germany and a series of contributors in the UK such as Cross, Wallace, and Pugh. The idea of design as a process is still not widely accepted in engineering in the United States outside of engineering design faculty, but many new and excellent texts have helped promote it very well in design courses in industrial and mechanical engineering. We anticipate it spreading to other fields of engineering. Most scholars who describe the design process actually do it in different ways. There may be an assumption that they all mean the same thing, although we doubt that these differences are meaningless. Similarly, no account covers the same design ideas and methods. Despite this, there is now an identifiable and complex body of knowledge we can call design, and there is no longer any excuse for treating design education as purely experiential projects and pre-study or P ge 10762.1 Proceedings of the 2005 American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference & Exposition Copyright © 2005, American Society for Engineering Education pre-work socialization. Further, design is now a researchable and dynamic body of knowledge with numerous dedicated research journals. And, fortunately, there are some fairly widely held views about what is true about the design process that will allow us to proceed without dissecting the different models of the process and the reasons for them. (Figure 1) Figure 1: Graphical Communication and the Design Process (Adapted from Eris, p138) Initially, design is a question-driven process. These questions create divergence in the scope of the information and knowledge assembled in support of the design process, as more avenues are explored and more stakeholders considered. Even the sheer volume of information grows rapidly. This divergence begins with the development of the problem through such processes as stakeholder identification; market assessment; project planning; team creation and management; establishing the use, needs, metrics, and constraints of the technology; and benchmarking competing products and services. These processes lead to the final divergent conceptual design stages, which are completing the problem definition and concept generation. This stage is then followed by a convergent process focused on decision-making more than questions that begins with assessing the tradeoffs of the most promising concepts generated including design-for-X considerations (e.g., safety, environment, manufacturing), marketing, and assessing the system resources available for producing the products and services, from manufacturing to supply chains. This is a convergent process because more and more information and ideas are “archived” as the focus on a design solution develops. This, in turn, leads to a concept being selected and the design embodiment of that concept with specifications for its functionality, materials, and dimensionality. That is, the detailed design work begins with all the familiar engineering graphics and CAD methods coming to the fore. If the design embodiment passes the design and stage gate (project management) reviews, then prototype build and test activities may follow and detailed plans for manufacturing and marketing will be generated. While the design of products, services, and systems all potentially have different design process models, we will use the above as a basis. P ge 10762.2 Proceedings of the 2005 American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference & Exposition Copyright © 2005, American Society for Engineering Education Detail Design and Conceptual Design Compared Historically, engineering graphics has focused on the methods of communication needed in the detail design stage. In that stage, however, the widespread adoption of powerful CAD software (entry level CAD is no longer widely used in engineering education) has triggered an adaptation process that is still being worked out. For example, the long dominant multi-view is becoming an analytical and detail tool, and traditional sectioning techniques are mostly irrelevant except for understanding the legacy of old manual drawings—or for use in manual sketching, which makes them relevant to conceptual design. Deciding topic priorities—what to include at all— and who will teach it, is causing a lot of stress in engineering graphics instruction during this transition from a well understood old world to a new world that refuses to find a steady state. The main issue is whether the extraordinary tools that CAD software provides engineering students as early as their first year should be supplemented with an understanding of what they are doing, and, if so, how? Here, we wish to move upstream in the design process and consider the neglected topic of graphical communication tools for the conceptual stage of design. Conceptual design is a stage where the amount of information flowing, the diverse nature of that information, and the speed at which it flows is far greater than in detailed design. It is also a stage where the information is of many different forms that are hard to capture via a single graphical mode or text format. Additionally, information flows during conceptual design need to promote, rather than constrain, creativity.