A Representation for Design Information During the Product Definition Process

Abstract

An experiment was conducted to determine how to best represent the information that is used by designers during the product defini tion process—the first step in the product realization process A real-time protocol session between a design engineer and a customer was re corded while they developed product requirements for a new bass-drum pedal From this session, a base-line representation was developed Three additional protocol sessions were recorded to test the base-line representation during which three other engineers designed products where the definition information was presented according to the base-line representation Results from this testing yielded a slightly changed rep resentation scheme which is presented in this paper The categories of information within the representation were also arranged based on the priorities of use from the three sessions, and a case example for the new representation is also presented This representation has become the model upon which we are developing a computer environment which serves as a common database for product definition during concurrent development of products

Keywords

product definition product requirement quality function deployment knowledge representation

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