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Design tool

About: Design tool is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 3864 publications have been published within this topic receiving 46401 citations.


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Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: Yang et al. as mentioned in this paper investigated how design experts use sketches, physical prototypes, and computer-aided design (CAD) to generate and represent ideas, as well as how these tools are linked to design attributes and multiple measures of design quality.
Abstract: Gathering user feedback on provisional design concepts early in the design process has the potential to reduce time-to-market and create more satisfying products. Among the parameters that shape user response to a product, this paper investigates how design experts use sketches, physical prototypes, and computer-aided design (CAD) to generate and represent ideas, as well as how these tools are linked to design attributes and multiple measures of design quality. Eighteen expert designers individually addressed a two-hour design task using only sketches, foam prototypes, or CAD. It was found that prototyped designs were generated more quickly than those created using sketches or CAD. Analysis of 406 crowdsourced responses to the resulting designs showed that those created as prototypes were perceived as more novel, more aesthetically pleasing, and more comfortable to use. It was also found that designs perceived as more novel tended to fare poorly on all other measured qualities. Submitted to the Special Issue on “User Needs and Preferences in Engineering Design” MD-14-1619 | Yang | 3 INTRODUCTION The goal of product design and development is to create products that fulfill user needs so that consumers will desire and purchase them. In early stage design, design teams generate several design alternatives, then select among them to determine one to pursue for further development [1]. A user-centered strategy to help teams select a design direction is to elicit feedback from users and other stakeholders on provisional design concepts. The design team may then incorporate this feedback into future iterations of the design. This phenomenon of obtaining feedback on provisional design representations has become even more prevalent through the rise of online crowdfunding sites, such as Kickstarter, that present consumers with pre-production designs in order to attract financial investment. Low-cost, quick prototypes, known as “minimum viable product” designs, have been embraced by entrepreneurs as a means to pre-validate business ideas with potential customers [2]. A myriad of factors can play into a user’s responses to a provisional design, from the design’s functionality to its visual styling to the way in which a design is presented to the user. This study examines and compares two factors that can influence the way a user evaluates a design. First, this study considers the tools to create a provisional design during the exploratory, generative stage of the design process. A range of design tools may support the development of preliminary concepts, such as 2D sketches, 3D physical prototypes, Submitted to the Special Issue on “User Needs and Preferences in Engineering Design” MD-14-1619 | Yang | 4 and digital models, and may do so at different levels of fidelity – from rough representations to realistic renderings. Such tools have inherent capabilities and limitations, which means the same concept created using different tools can result in different designs and thereby potentially influence the feedback that users provide. For example, a preliminary design with complex curves that may be relatively fast and easy to sketch or shape from a piece of foam may be challenging to model using CAD. Moreover, the choice of design tool is in tension with the resources required to create the design representation. Generally, the higher the fidelity of the representation, the more skill and time required to create it. Higher fidelity representations may also require that the designer make additional decisions about design details in order to achieve the desired level of representation fidelity. Second, this study examines the attributes of the design itself, which may relate to the design’s functionality, interactions, appearance, and use, among others. Key product attributes are not only what users look for when making a purchase decision, but can characterize what it means to be an innovative product [3]. For example, gas mileage may be the most important attribute to a car buyer, while screen size may be an important determinant to someone selecting a mobile phone. This study investigates the interplay between the tools used by practitioners during preliminary design, a product’s attributes, and user evaluations of a design, and Submitted to the Special Issue on “User Needs and Preferences in Engineering Design” MD-14-1619 | Yang | 5 aims to uncover significant relationships among these using relative, rather than absolute, comparisons. The following research questions are framed: • How does the choice of design tool impact the rate of idea generation and the total number of ideas produced? • What is the relationship between the choice of design tool and how users evaluate a design based on its qualities? • What is the relationship between a product’s attributes and its perceived qualities? Are certain design attributes more, or less, strongly linked to specific product qualities? • What is the interplay of the tools used to create a preliminary design and the attributes of the resulting designs?

58 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this article, the 3D design and analysis of a 5'kW micro turbo expanders for small, distributed ORC power units is proposed, starting from a recently developed 0D design tool, which was initially applied to 50'kw radial turbines.

58 citations

Proceedings ArticleDOI
01 Jan 2006
TL;DR: Both the qualitative and quantitative studies indicate that the Concept Generator is a promising first step toward the creation of an effective design tool for the conceptual phase of design.
Abstract: The current version of the Concept Generator, an automated mathematically-based design tool, is studied in an effort to validate its general approach and establish research goals for further development. As part of the study, four undergraduate engineering researchers from the University of Missouri-Rolla and University of Texas at Austin execute a qualitative study of the software’s effectiveness at producing useful design solutions. The students engage in several activities designed to test the capabilities of this early version of the software. A report of their results and analyses identifies the benefits and disadvantages of the software (and underlying method) as viewed at this stage of development. Furthermore, the design solution data collected by the undergraduate researchers is analyzed more quantitatively during a post-study investigation. Both the qualitative and quantitative studies indicate that the Concept Generator is a promising first step toward the creation of an effective design tool for the conceptual phase of design. Furthermore, the student reports on their hands-on experiences with the software identify strengths and weaknesses of this early version of the Concept Generator and help establish many avenues for further development of the design tool.Copyright © 2006 by ASME

57 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: This paper presents a simulation-based design approach based on the analysis of the actual traffic trace of the application, considering local variations in traffic rates, temporal overlap among traffic streams, and criticality of traffic streams that leads to large reduction in communication architecture power consumption and total wirelength.
Abstract: Designing a power-efficient interconnection architecture for multiprocessor systems-on-chips (MPSoCs) satisfying the application performance constraints is a nontrivial task. In order to meet the tight time-to-market constraints and to effectively handle the design complexity, it is essential to provide a computer-aided design tool support for automating this task. In this paper, we address the issue of ldquoapplication-specific design of optimal crossbar architecturerdquo satisfying the performance requirements of the application and optimal binding of the cores onto the crossbar resources. We present a simulation-based design approach that is based on the analysis of the actual traffic trace of the application, considering local variations in traffic rates, temporal overlap among traffic streams, and criticality of traffic streams. Our approach is physical design aware, where the wiring complexity of the crossbar architecture is also considered during the design process. This leads to detecting timing violations on the wires early in the design cycle and to having accurate estimates of the power consumption on the wires. We apply our methodology onto several MPSoC designs, and the synthesized crossbar platforms are validated for performance by cycle-accurate SystemC simulation of the designs. The crossbar matrix power consumption values are based on the synthesis of the register transfer level models of the designs, obtained using industry standard tools. The experimental case studies show large reduction in communication architecture power consumption (45.3% on average) and total wirelength (38% on average) for the MPSoC designs when compared with traditional design approaches. The synthesized crossbar designs also lead to large reduction in transaction latencies (up to 7 ) when compared with the existing design approaches.

57 citations

Proceedings ArticleDOI
03 Dec 2007
TL;DR: A plug-in for ANDES is developed, called ModelGeneration, which bridges the gap between the semantics needed for sensor networks and the syntax supported by AADL, which makes it easy for sensor network designers to build system models that are intuitive to them.
Abstract: We have developed an analysis-based design tool, ANDES, for modeling a wireless sensor network system and analyzing its performance before deployment ANDES enables designers to systematically develop a model for the system, refine it iteratively by tuning the system parameters based on existing analysis techniques, and resolve key design decisions according to the required system performance. We also present a real-time communication schedulability analysis for sensor networks based on exact characterization which utilizes information regarding network topology and workload characteristics to analyze the schedulability of a set of periodic streams with real-time constraints. We further demonstrate the use of ANDES for the designers through detailed case studies where we design wireless sensor network applications (for target detection and environmental monitoring) using ANDES and validate the results through simulations. Currently, ANDES supports communication schedulability analysis, target tracking analysis and real-time capacity analysis which work on system models with differing levels of detail. ANDES has been developed by extending the AADL/OSATE framework which has been used extensively for real-time and embedded systems. Based on key insights gained from the development of this analysis tool, we address issues in AADL for its use in the field of wireless sensor networks. We have developed a plug-in for ANDES, called ModelGeneration, which bridges the gap between the semantics needed for sensor networks and the syntax supported by AADL. This makes it easy for sensor network designers to build system models that are intuitive to them. Furthermore, ANDES is extensible and new analysis techniques can be easily incorporated into the toolset.

57 citations


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Performance
Metrics
No. of papers in the topic in previous years
YearPapers
20233
20227
202184
2020133
2019139
2018157