Supporting Problem Expression within a Co-evolutionary Design Framework

Abstract

From a generic point of view, the engineering design process can be considered as the transformation of needs into a complete product definition. Besides the needs, designers have to take into account some constraints. In this sense, the design process can be seen as a problem solving process, with some specific properties. Several models of the design process exist that consider this problem and its expression differently. We will question the consideration of the design problem in the classical approaches, and identify the relevance of co-evolutionary models to describe the design process, including its cognitive aspects. An activity-based co-evolutionary model of the design process is thus proposed, which defines and situates the objects implicated in evaluation and problem expression. A well-established design corpus is used to evaluate the relevance of the proposed approach to fit a real design process. The objective of the work described in this paper is to use this model as a basis to investigate the support of problem expression, and the activities that refer to it, in a concurrent engineering context.