The Grammar of Technology Development

Abstract

Grammar of technology development is a trans-disciplinary description of common approaches to well-controlled technology developments in which the most effective method for development is systematically selected. Here technology development involves the following four sequential activities for both a real society and the corresponding virtual society using appropriate engineering models:

• 1) Value selection of targets by defining the expected recognized quality elements.

• 2) Translation of the recognized quality elements occurring in societies into functional quality elements that designers and engineers can specify concrete parameters in their engineering models.

• 3) Optimization of design parameters of the engineering models to ascertain their usability.

• 4) Value injection into the real society to harmonize realized functional qualities and corresponding recognized quality.

Each activity above may be partly supported by classical statistical thinking established by Karl Pearson’s grammar of descriptive sciences in the late 19^th century, however, a new statistical thinking should be introduced for evaluating results not derived from observation of a real community but from a simulation on a virtual society. Geninchi Taguchi and his colleagues have already developed such methodology for optimization activities implicitly based on such new thinking for technology development. The paper describes an aspect of new statistical thinking for technology development through reviews and interpretation of Taguchi’s contribution to the design of experiments.