This 2001 book covers theory and applications of conceptual design, the initial stage of engineering design.

Conceptual design plays a critical role in engineering design, as the innovation level of a product is mostly determined in this stage. Within conceptual design, concept generation is essential, as it allows designers to propose innovative concepts that bring value to customers. However, keeping developing innovative concepts is not easy for designers. They are very likely to be fixed by existing concepts or solutions, which restrained them from offering new concepts.The thesis's objective is to contribute to enhancing innovation in concept generation by helping designers to mitigate this design fixation. To reach this goal, our proposal is to help them in better structuring their knowledge.Following clearly specified research procedures, we first take the case study of smartwatches design to learn lessons and explore patterns. Based on these findings, we develop a knowledge-based heuristic centred methodology to guide designers in innovative concept generation. The methodology provides guidelines that lead designers along with different steps, from knowledge identification to knowledge structuring.This method is illustrated on the smartwatches case study and experimented in different situations.

Conceptual design is a vital part of the design process during which designers first envision new ideas and then synthesize them into physical configurations that meet certain design specifications. In this research, a computational approach is developed to assist the designers perform this non-trivial task of navigating the design space for creating conceptual design configurations. The methodology is based on combining empirical reverse engineering techniques with a graph-grammar approach. Accordingly, design knowledge is systematically extracted from past designs, formulated as procedural grammar rules, and employed in building new design concepts. The implemented system provides a theoretical framework for automatically searching conceptual design spaces and produces novel alternative configurations to real design problems. The application of the approach to the design of various electromechanical devices shows the method's range of capabilities, and how it serves as a comparison to human conceptual design generation and as a tool to complement the skills of a designer.

Maximising reader insights into the theory, models, methods and fundamental reasoning of design, this book addresses design activities in industrial settings, as well as the actors involved. This approach offers readers a new understanding of design activities and related functions, properties and dispositions. Presenting a ‘design mindset’ that seeks to empower students, researchers, and practitioners alike, it features a strong focus on how designers create new concepts to be developed into products, and how they generate new business and satisfy human needs. Employing a multi-faceted perspective, the book supplies the reader with a comprehensive worldview of design in the form of a proposed model that will empower their activities as student, researcher or practitioner. We draw the reader into the core role of design conceptualisation for society, for the development of industry, for users and buyers of products, and for citizens in relation to public systems. The book also features original contributions related to exploration, conceptualisation and product synthesis. Exploring both the power and limitations of formal design process models, methods, and tools viewed in the light of human ingenuity and cognition, the book develops a unique design mindset that adds human understanding to the list of methods and tools essential to design. This insight is distilled into useful mindset heuristics included throughout the book.

The ability to design is the distinguishing characteristic of an engineer. Recent research has increased our understanding of both the engineering design process and effective means for teaching that process to neophyte design engineers. In that spirit, a design methodology was developed at the Institute for Innovation and Design in Engineering (IIDE), Texas A & M University. At the core of this approach is a design philosophy based on the cognitive skills of Abstraction, Critical Parameter Identification, and Questioning. This philosophy along with the design process is taught in the senior undergraduate design and graduate design courses. The goal of the methodology is not only to teach the design process to novice designers but also to instill in them the design philosophy that would enable them to perform design effectively and innovatively in any area of specialty. Inthis dissertation the design philosophy along with its role in the design methodology is explained. The Need Analysis and the Conceptual Design stages of the IIDE methodology are elaborated. The weaknesses in these stages are identified and addressed, by developing and incorporating design methods and techniques that fit the spirit and framework of the IIDE design methodology. The Object Function Method was developed to address certain aspects at the Need Analysis stage. There was need for an effective concept searching method within the Concept Design stage of the IIDE design methodology. This is addressed by the development of new search techniques and methods for effective concept discovery during concept searching. The usage and application of these methods and techniques is explained in detail along with examples. Additionally, this dissertation contains the results of a study conducted with two groups of senior design students, those who have been through the process and those who have not, to evaluate the effectiveness of applying the IIDE design philosophy and performing the Need Analysis and Conceptual Design stages for the given design challenge. The goal of the study was to investigate the relationship, if any, between the degree to which these aspects of the design methodology were followed and the quality of the resulting design solutions produced.

Every product development professional should have a copy of this book because it covers the entire spectrum of the product design process. In particular, it emphasizes that a total design approach--in all its complexity--is absolutely essential for consistent success in product development.

Product Concept Design has been written by a collection of researchers and practising designers from leading companies such as Nokia and Volvo. The book explains the process of conceptual design of new manufactured products and shows how the principles involved are employed in real examples of consumer products from some of the world’s most important corporations detailed by the designers themselves. The book will be bought by designers and managers in industry, as well as lecturers in design and design engineering and their students.