Decision making in product design – bridging the gap between inception and reality

Product Design in the modern world is a complex multifaceted discipline comprising of many skills and applications. It also operates in cross-disciplinary contexts both in direct teams but also contributing to strategic business of manufacturers, government/councils and not for profit organisations. It is no longer a purely creative problem solving activity where a good idea or innovation is enough to push forward a new product. For the majority of the design profession the days of design on the back of an envelope are gone. Today design is a structured activity with recognizable and repeatable methodologies and processes. Within this the profession is acknowledging and aligning with the principles of business management. A consequence is that designers are capable of undertaking ever increasingly complex challenges. Education needs to train designers to recognise and operate in these complex situations. As a response Universities now include project or design management within curriculum. ‘The new programme should equip the students with not only the ability to design, manufacture and test design solutions; but also with a firm knowledge of business strategy’ [1] However the authors have recognized a gap within the profession and education for a more structured and validated approach to decision making within the design process. This paper outlines a pilot study within a student project whereby professional decision making tools are introduced to final year students and used to validate selection of appropriate designs from initial concepts against a hierarchy of criteria.Peer reviewe

Well being as a criteria for product design

Research has indicated that Happiness in the Western World Peaked in the late 1950’s. This correlates with the accelerated growth in both Product Design and Consumption*. Historically Product Designers have concerned themselves with manufactured objects through negotiated briefs for clients either as external consultants or in-house designers. Within this remit traditional attributes of a product are well understood but the defining criteria for success is the bottom line of profitability. However there has recently been a shift in application of the design process (or Design Thinking) to a diverse range of market sectors and problems. With this comes a reappraisal of the criteria which designers should use to gauge success. Product Designers should acknowledge that they have a responsibility, beyond the bottom line of usability and commercial profit, to deliver equitable value to many stakeholders. Among these values are social indicators such as well-being in contrast to short term desire (point of purchase), happiness or pleasure rather than functionality and value for money. The values by which design outputs are judged have become a lot more complex. This paper sets out to explore these issues and a call for Product Design application to expand from purely commercial to that of responding to human requirements whether individual, communal or cultural. It attempts to address what we mean by the terms well-being and happiness and how these can form part of both a design brief and a mechanism for judging success. It uses a series of student projects as case studies to introduce these concerns to design students and finally muses on the value of design itself as a mechanism for creating positive sustainable futures. *From www.storyofstuff .com/Annie Leonard, accessed 17th November 2014Peer reviewedFinal Accepted Versio

Large Deviations and Exit-times for reflected McKean-Vlasov equations with self-stabilizing terms and superlinear drifts

We study a class of reflected McKean-Vlasov diffusions over a convex domain with self-stabilizing coefficients. This includes coefficients that do not satisfy the classical Wasserstein Lipschitz condition. Further, the process is constrained to a (not necessarily bounded) convex domain by a local time on the boundary. These equations include the subclass of reflected self-stabilizing diffusions that drift towards their mean via a convolution of the solution law with a stabilizing potential. Firstly, we establish existence and uniqueness results for this class and address the propagation of chaos. We work with a broad class of coefficients, including drift terms that are locally Lipschitz in spatial and measure variables. However, we do not rely on the boundedness of the domain or the coefficients to account for these non-linearities and instead use the self-stabilizing properties. We prove a Freidlin-Wentzell type Large Deviations Principle and an Eyring-Kramer's law for the exit-time from subdomains contained in the interior of the reflecting domain.Comment: 41 page

Experimental microbial evolution: History and conceptual underpinnings

We chronicle and dissect the history of the field of Experimental Microbial Evolution, beginning with work by Monod. Early research was largely carried out by microbiologists and biochemists, who used experimental evolutionary change as a tool to understand structure-function relationships. These studies attracted the interest of evolutionary biologists who recognized the power of the approach to address issues such as the tempo of adaptive change, the costs and benefits of sex, parallelism, and the role which contingency plays in the evolutionary process. In the 1980s and 1990s, an ever-expanding body of microbial, physiological and biochemical data, together with new technologies for manipulating microbial genomes, allowed such questions to be addressed in ever-increasing detail. Since then, technological advances leading to low-cost, high-throughput DNA sequencing have made it possible for these and other fundamental questions in evolutionary biology to be addressed at the molecular level

Coevolution In Bacterial‐Plasmid Populations

Peer Reviewedhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/137199/1/evo04336.pd

A Stochastic Analysis of Proposals for the New US Farm Bill

Most of the large scale modeling systems used in the analysis of agricultural policies produce deterministic projections. In reality, however, the agricultural sector is subject to a high degree of uncertainty as a result of fluctuations in exogenous factors such as the weather or macroeconomic variation. A stochastic approach can provide additional information to policy makers regarding the implications of this uncertainty, through the use of stochastically generated projections. This paper also shows how deterministic analysis may result in systematic errors in the projection of some variables. As an applied example, the FAPRI model of the US agricultural sector is simulated stochastically to analyse the impact of proposals for the new US farm bill.Stochastic simulation, US Farm Bill, policy analysis, Agricultural and Food Policy,

Thinking big: here comes the sun

In 2000, Pincott and Branthwaite published ‘Nothing New Under the Sun?’ which discussed the role of the internet in research both in terms of the hazards and opportunities this confers. Specifically, Pincott and Branthwaite argued that whilst the advent of the internet offers up new approaches and techniques, this must not be at the detriment of methodological rigour and standards we have grown accustomed to in the industry. In this paper, it is argued that the advent of big data, big qual and the emerging potential of the metaverse present new opportunities in research but pose the same questions originally conceived by Pincott & Branthwaite, 2000. Moreover, methodological rigour and standards are framed by three interconnected themes, namely, the role of data science and big data, the importance of softer skills of interpretation and narration and finally, the role of theory in elevating and grounding research

A Traditional Approach to 3D Printing

Product Design has, since the 1980’s, developed beyond the remit of the traditional realisation of the object or product. That is Design is seen as a problem identification and solution methodology which can be applied to several contexts and needs (1). However there is still a need to be able to understand and realise an object. That is the knowledge of materials and how they are processed into components. Also in the last few years the possibilities for rapid prototyping and manufacture through 3D printing machines has become financially possible and creatively opens up new possibilities. Objects can be manufactured which were impossible a few years ago. We have taken a pragmatic approach which utilises the possibilities of 3D Printing to understand the complexity of manufacture through a design and build project. Whereas most student projects conclude with propositions few are carried through to validation. Although the more engineering based programmes do built and test prototypes, complexities of design for manufacture are usually left unresolved. Students are challenged to design, manufacture and assemble a working model of an Alarm Clock. Each component has to be designed against an understanding of a material and production process and then prototyped on a SD Printer. The final product is then assembled from these prototype components. Within this construct students learn about component design and product assemble while also negotiating the compromises needed between design and manufacture. There is rigour in the realisation of the final working models. The paper concludes with a reflection of the value of this project against the learning curve of student experience as a training for the product design profession. 1.T of Design, UK Design CouncilPeer reviewe

Understanding through Making

Julian Lindley, Richard Adams, Stephen McGonigal, John Beaufoy, ‘Understanding through Making’, paper presented at the International Conference on Engineering and Product Design Education, University of Twente, The Netherlands, 4-5 July, 2014.The core theme of the paper is incorporating an empirical approach in the understanding of object value(s) within Product Design. It is a reaction too and an acknowledgement of the changing nature of both the students previous experiences and the value of design to the modern world. With the former, applicants lack the breadth of basic skills in drawing, making and experimentation. Indeed many lack a curiosity which is natural to design. This is in part due to the diminishing number of applicants from Foundation Courses in Art and Design (United Kingdom). These pre-degree courses encourage experimentation and play in understanding materials and structures. Another observation is that design has progressed beyond the production of artefacts to a process of problem identification and solving (1). In this context Sustainability, Brand and Human Centred Design are all common themes within design curricula. However focussing on these in an already congested curriculum has left some of the basic skills and investigations lacking in students vocabulary and skills within design. The paper outlines a way in which an understanding of structures and objects can be achieved. Two projects are cited, the first a project which gets students to think with their hands and make quickly. In essence the project is about the deconstruction and re-constructing of chairs. Based on the work of Martino Gamper (2), students are challenged to make new chairs using discarded and broken chairs as source material. Within this construct issues of material and object value can be discussed as well as product lifetime, product evolution and second life. The second project builds on this experience with a mechanical design challenge, that of an Automata. With this project students start investigating on paper but quickly need to develop with simple mechanical mock ups both in 2D and 3D. The combination of these projects amongst others equips students with a preliminary understanding of construction, mechanics, materials and aesthetics. This is a starting point for understanding the physicality of artefacts underpinning Product Design Education. 1. RSA Design & Society Social Animals: tomorrow’s designers in today’s world by Sophia Parker. P19, 2009 2. 100 Chairs in 100 DaysPeer reviewe