How has Japan become a major economic power, a world leader in the automotive and electronics industries? What is the secret of their success? The consensus has been that, though the Japanese are not particularly innovative, they are exceptionally skilful at imitation, at improving products that already exist. But now two leading Japanese business experts, Ikujiro Nonaka and Hiro Takeuchi, turn this conventional wisdom on its head: Japanese firms are successful, they contend, precisely because they are innovative, because they create new knowledge and use it to produce successful products and technologies. Examining case studies drawn from such firms as Honda, Canon, Matsushita, NEC, 3M, GE, and the U.S. Marines, this book reveals how Japanese companies translate tacit to explicit knowledge and use it to produce new processes, products, and services.

The knowledge-creating company : how Japanese companies create the dynamics of innovation

* Starting from Need* Evolution of the Toyota Production System* Further Development* Genealogy of the Toyota Production System* The True Intention of the Ford System* Surviving the Low-Growth Period

Toyota production system : beyond large-scale production

A prevalent and pervasive view of designing is that it can be modeled using variables and decisions made about what values should be taken by these variables. The activity of designing is carried out with the expectation that the designed artifact will operate in the natural world and the social world. These worlds impose constraints on the variables and their values; so, design could be described as a goal-oriented, constrained, decision- making activity. However, design distinguish- es itself from other similarly described activities not only by its domain but also by additional necessary features. Designing involves exploration, exploring what variables might be appropriate. The process of explo- ration involves both goal variables and deci- sion variables. In addition, designing involves learning: Part of the exploration activity is learning about emerging features as a design proceeds. Finally, design activity occurs within two contexts: the context within which the designer operates and the context produced by the developing design itself. The designer’s perception of what the context is affects the implication of the context on the design. The context shifts as the designer’s perceptions change. Design activity can be now characterized as a goal-oriented, con- strained, decision-making, exploration, and learning activity that operates within a con- text that depends on the designer’s percep- tion of the context.

Design Prototypes: A Knowledge Representation Schema for Design

Product design is a highly involved, often ill-defined, complex and iterative process, and the needs and specifications of the required artifact get more refined only as the design process moves toward its goal. An effective computer support tool that helps the designer make better-informed decisions requires efficient knowledge representation schemes. In today's world, there is a virtual explosion in the amount of raw data available to the designer, and knowledge representation is critical in order to sift through this data and make sense of it. In addition, the need to stay competitive has shrunk product development time through the use of simultaneous and collaborative design processes, which depend on effective transfer of knowledge between teams. Finally, the awareness that decisions made early in the design process have a higher impact in terms of energy, cost, and sustainability, has resulted in the need to project knowledge typically required in the later stages of design to the earlier stages. Research in design rationale systems, product families, systems engineering, and ontology engineering has sought to capture knowledge from earlier product design decisions, from the breakdown of product functions and associated physical features, and from customer requirements and feedback reports. VR (Virtual reality) systems and multidisciplinary modeling have enabled the simulation of scenarios in the manufacture, assembly, and use of the product. This has helped capture vital knowledge from these stages of the product life and use it in design validation and testing. While there have been considerable and significant developments in knowledge capture and representation in product design, it is useful to sometimes review our position in the area, study the evolution of research in product design, and from past and current trends, try and foresee future developments. The goal of this paper is thus to review both our understanding of the field and the support tools that exist for the purpose, and identify the trends and possible directions research can evolve in the future.

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The evolution, challenges, and future of knowledge representation in product design systems

This paper presents a state of the art review of existing research, projects, and applications in the domain of collaborative conceptual design, based on the Internet and Web technologies. The purpose of the review is to understand the needs for conceptual engineering design, to clarify the current conceptual design practice, to classify the available technologies, and to study the future trend in this area. The emphasis of this paper is to briefly outline the methodologies, architectures, and tools developed for the projects reviewed in this paper. It also uncovers approaches to conflict resolution and team/project management, as they are vital to a successful engineering design in a collaborative environment. More than 80 journal and conference papers and about 20 projects are reviewed based on the primary focus mentioned above. The selected research works are further categorised into several areas based on the application domain, design theory, and the technology used for implementation. The selected research projects and applications are basically for, but not limited to, the collaborative conceptual design.

Collaborative conceptual design—state of the art and future trends

The subject of this paper is the Design Rationale editor (DRed). This is a simple and unobtrusive software tool that allows engineering designers to record their rationale as the design proceeds. DRed is one of the latest of many derivatives of the venerable IBIS concept. Thus it allows the issues addressed, options considered, plus associated pro and con arguments, to be captured in the form of a directed graph of dependencies. The research was conducted in close collaboration with, deployed, and tested in a major multinational aerospace company. The paper describes the main features of the tool, by means of a real design example from the company. It then examines the methodology and process by which the tool was researched, implemented and introduced into industrial practice. Finally, DRed is compared with other IBIS-based software, to identify and explain how it addresses problems that seem to have made earlier tools unsuitable for routine use by designers. Simplicity seems to be a key factor for real world acceptance of such tools.

Capturing design rationale

With increased pressures coming from global competition and requirements for greater innovation in product development, designers are hard pressed to deliver designs of higher quality and variety using a repertoire of technological options from different disciplines. This interdisciplinary product development approach has not only removed many of the traditional constraints to design but has now given designers a much wider freedom of choice as to the best solution to a design problem. The focus of this paper is a knowledge-based design environment called Schemebuilder, which is a comprehensive and integrated suite of software tools aimed at supporting the designer in the rapid development of product design models in the conceptual, through embodiment stages of design. Illustrated is the use of the software tools in the qualitative generation of alternative schemes, by application of stored working and decomposition principles in the development of a function-means tree-like information structure. With mechatronic product development as the main theme, this paper describes a closely integrated methodology that incorporates a bond graph approach to continuous-time energetic systems and high-level Petri nets for the rigorous description of discrete-time information systems. Additionally, a technique is suggested for the decomposition of free format statements of need into the rigorously defined design context and required functions, which form the starting point of the function-means development process.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/S0890060400001657

Functional descriptions used in computer support for qualitative scheme generation—“Schemebuilder”

This paper describes a software tool called DRed (the D esign R ationale ed itor), that allows engineering designers to record their design rationale (DR) at the time of its generation and deliberation. DRed is one of many proposed derivatives of the venerable IBIS concept, but by contrast with other tools of this type, practicing designers appear surprisingly willing to use it. DRed allows the issues addressed, options considered, and associated arguments for and against, to be captured graphically. The software, despite still being essentially a research prototype, is already in use on high profile design projects in an international aerospace company, including the presentation of results of design work to external customers. The paper compares DRed with other IBIS-derived software tools, to explain how it addresses problems that seem to have made them unsuitable for routine use by designers. In addition to the capture and presentation of the DR itself, the set of linked DR graphs can be used to provide a map of the contents of an electronic Design Folder, containing all the documents created by an individual or team during a design project. The structure of the knowledge model instantiated in such a Design Folder is described. By reprising a design case study published at the DTM 2003 conference, concerning the design of a Mobile Arm Support (MAS), the DRed knowledge model is compared with the previously proposed Design Data Model (DDM), to show how it addresses the shortcomings identified in the DDM. Finally the methodology and results of the preliminary evaluation of the use of DRed by aerospace designers are presented.Copyright © 2004 by ASME

DRed and Design Folders: A Way of Capturing, Storing and Passing On Knowledge Generated During Design Projects

The retrieval of structured design rationale for the re-use of design knowledge with an integrated representation

This paper describes the research, implementation and industrial evaluation, of DRed (Design Rationale editor), a software tool that allows designers to record their design rationale (DR) at the time it is deliberated. DRed provides an easy to use graphical structure to present the issues addressed, options considered, and associated arguments for and against each one. The statuses of individual elements, and the overall state of completion of the design are clearly visible. The resulting DR graphs are clear, comprehensive, printable, and highly suitable for presentation in review meetings and inclusion in design reports. Freehand sketches, and screen captures from any other PC software used in the design, can easily be incorporated in the DR graphs. DRed is a derivative of the venerable IBIS concept, but contrary to most of the published research in this area, designers in industry have found it natural and helpful to use on complex problem diagnosis and design tasks. It is shown how the rapid research, robust implementation and successful introduction into industry of DRed, was facilitated and guided by the use of a new methodology for researching computer-aided engineering design tools, that has been proposed and is being adopted at the Cambridge Engineering Design Centre (EDC).

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Rob H. Bracewell

Papers

Capturing design rationale

Functional descriptions used in computer support for qualitative scheme generation—“Schemebuilder”

DRed and Design Folders: A Way of Capturing, Storing and Passing On Knowledge Generated During Design Projects

The retrieval of structured design rationale for the re-use of design knowledge with an integrated representation

A tool for capturing design rationale