Designing without Models

Abstract

Designing can be understood as an artistic or as a scientific activity. From the scientific point of view design can be considered as data processing. The working steps, which have to be carried out in designing, can be deduced from the physical experiment. These working steps are the choice of the function or the purpose of a machine, the choice of the physical process and the choice of the design features to enforce this physical process. For every step the possibilities of realization are explained. The method will be applied to the design of a wire-drawing machine. To begin with the black box is drawn to describe the change of the properties of the wire inside the machine. Then the steps of realization of the contents of the black box will be shown from the functional structure of the machine to the drawings for the manufacturing process. Important factors are included, such as the suppression of the disturbances of the physical process, the interaction of man and machine, and the criteria for the selection of the optimal solution. In this way one is able to do design work without having models.