A social media framework to support engineering design communication

AbstractEngineering Design Communication (EDC) is fundamental to almost all Engineering Design activities as it provides the ability for knowledge and information to be shared between engineers. It is part of ‘what we do’. This communication contains a great deal of rationale relating to the evolution of Product Development and is essential for understanding ‘why the product is the way it is’. The need to support EDC is becoming more important due to the fact that Product Development is becoming more distributed, multi-disciplinary and involving greater re-use of past designs. With the advent of Social Media (SM), it is argued that there is the technical capability to provide more effective support for EDC within a computer-mediated environment. In order to explore this potential, this paper defines the requirements for the effective support of EDC through an extensive review of the literature. It then discusses the suitability of a SM approach and then presents the theoretical foundations of a SM framework to support EDC

Supporting engineering design communication using a custom-built social media tool - PartBook

AbstractEngineering Design Communication is the main tributary for the sharing of information, knowledge & insights, and is fundamental to engineering work. Engineers spend a significant portion of their day communicating as they ‘fill in the gaps’ left by formal documentation and processes. Therefore, it comes as no surprise that there is much extant literature on this subject. The majority has been descriptive with little prescriptive research involving the introduction of either a tool or process. To begin to address this, previous work reports a Social Media framework to support Engineering Design Communication and this paper builds upon this previous work through the instantiation of the framework within a custom-built Social Media tool hereto referred to as PartBook. This has been prescribed within an eleven week race car design project. The study addresses the validation of the requirements that underpin the Social Media framework as well as investigating the impact the tool has/may have on engineering work, engineering artefacts and engineering project management. In order to do so, data has been captured through user activity, system usability, questionnaire, semi-structured interview and informal feedback

Modelling impacts of vegetation cover change on regional climate

Extensive areas of native vegetation in Queensland and other states have been cleared for agriculture, improved pastures and urban development. However, the potential impact of land clearing on Australia’s climate has been largely ignored in current climate change projections and policies. In this study, we addressed the question - is Australia’s regional climate sensitive to land cover change? We conducted simulation experiments using the CSIRO MARK 3 climate model to compare the effects on regional climate based on differences between pre-European and 1990 vegetation cover. The two experiments aimed to reproduce the Australian climate for the period 1951-2003, with the only difference being the conversion of land cover from native vegetation to pastures and crops. Consistent with actual climate trends since the 1950s, simulated annual and seasonal surface temperatures showed statistically significant warming for eastern Australia (0.4-2°C) and southwest Western Australia (0.4-0.8°C), being most pronounced in summer. Mean summer rainfall showed a decrease of 4-12% in eastern Australia and 4-8% in southwest Western Australia which coincided with regions where the most extensive land clearing has occurred. Further, the study found an increase in temperatures on average by 2°C, especially in southern Queensland and New South Wales, for the recent 2002/2003 drought. The findings suggest that the large scale clearance of native vegetation is amplifying the adverse impacts associated with El Niño drought periods, which together with rainfall deficiency, is having a strong impact on Australia’s already stressed natural resources and agriculture. Implications for Policy: We suggest that policy needs to recognise that climate change is a two-way process, and that broad scale clearing of native vegetation cover has a strong influence on climate in addition to greenhouse gases. Protecting and restoring Australia's native vegetation therefore needs to be a critical policy and management consideration in mitigating the effects of climate change

Key themes in design information management

International audienc