Product Design and the Role of Representation

Foundations for Design Thinking in Practice

Eujin Pei, James Andrew Self

• Publisher: CRC Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9780367630010
• eBook ISBN: 9781000474503
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Technology & Engineering
• Subtopic: Mechanical Engineering
• Index: Technology & Engineering

"This book responds to the expression 'all you always wanted to know about design representation but didn't know where to ask'. Indeed, the book is a thematic guide to design representation, and the amount of information about design representations it holds is phenomenal."

Professor Gabriela Goldschmidt

Technion - Israel Institute of Technology

This book extends understanding of the design process by exploring design representation types and examining them as theoretical constructs. It shows how fidelity and ambiguity inform the creative act of design, and considers design thinking through the lens of design representation.

Design thinking is a method that has the potential to stimulate and enhance creativity. This book enhances understanding of what constitutes design thinking, why it is used and how it can be applied in practice to explore and develop ideas. The book positions a particular type of thinking through design representations, exploring this from its roots in design history, to the types of thinking in action associated with contemporary design practice. A taxonomy of design representations as a scaffold to express design intent, is applied to real world case studies.

Product Design and the Role of Representation will be of interest to those working in or studying product development, engineering design and additive manufacturing.

1 Design and design representation

DOI: 10.1201/9781003227694-1

1.1 Design as practice, Design as an activity

According to Bürdek (2005), design is defined as a plan or scheme devised by a person to develop man-made artefacts for a specific purpose. It can also refer to the arrangement of elements in a product or as a work of art. Design has also been employed to add value to a product and as a communication and retail strategy. From a wider perspective, design brings various elements together to inform the development of appropriate solutions, thereby adding value to people’s lives (Pipes 2007). If correctly implemented, good design can enhance the quality of life through innovation, proposing suitable forms, structures and manufacturing requirements that appropriately respond to functional, technical, economic and cultural needs (Fiell and Fiell 2003a). For the purpose of this book, the term design is concerned with idea-based disciplines, comprising product and industrial design, engineering design, communication design, architecture, user-interaction/user-experience (UI/UX) design and fashion design among others. We differentiate design from both art and science, and position design representation as critical to the thinking and practices required in an activity aimed at exploring preferred futures.

In contrast to science, where design is justified in being societal, functional and meaningful; science is ruled by formulas, protocol and constraints (Sparke 1983). The natural sciences may be further defined through an objective pursuit of identifiable truths about our external environment (natural sciences). Likewise, the social sciences explore the human condition through the application of the scientific method. In doing so, science builds theory towards an understanding of our world, in the sense that the world is understood through the identification of objective truths waiting to be known. These then manifest as general theory through empirical analysis. Through the scientific method, the resulting theory may be falsified or revised considering new evidence.

Matthew McClumpha’s work involving interviewing stakeholders and users, followed by ideation, development and the modelling process is shown in Figures 1.1, 1.2, 1.3.

Figure 1.1 User studies (McClumpha 2020).

Figure 1.2 Photograph of a designer's sketchbook (McClumpha, 2020).

Figure 1.3 Functional Concept Models being tested at a beach (McClumpha, 2020).

In contrast to the sciences, design is concerned with creation. In particular, design aims to create potential futures, thereby realising the man-made, material world around us. Thus, design is also pervasive in the sense that everything around us, with the exception of the natural world, has been created by someone (Cross 2021). Although design may draw on scientific understanding, design does not aim to identify objective truths. Rather, design proposes interventions that have the potential to improve the existing situation through the creative proporsition of potential futures, which then may be implemented through various production methods and processes.

Although the arts and design share common ground, in particular their role as reflections on culture and attitudes and relation to societal trends, unlike the arts, design’s concern extends beyond the representation of the world, culture, politics and values. Although design may very well embody these broader themes, messages and concepts. Instead, design has a greater focus on how interventions may add value for others. This user-focus often requires an understanding of and consideration for both emotional aspects (design aesthetics, design semantics) and functional requirements (related to end users). As a result, design must provide interventions that are appropriate for and add value to the lives of others on both emotional and practical dimensions. In this more holistic sense, design often requires a kind of thinking that can support a synthesis of many issues when exploring, defining and creating design solutions.

If we frame design as the proposition and implementation of more appropriate futures, the act of designing involves creatively building the nature, appearance and social function of objects (Tjalve 1979). It entails the use of problem-solving methods and creativity to produce the desired properties of a product (Andreasen et al. 1988). As design ideas are formulated in the mind, various elements and constraints are considered, balancing practical function with aesthetics (Cross 1996). However, when mental images in the mind (internal representations) are produced and externalised through sketching, drawing and modelling (Goel 1995), the externalised representation of intent act as distributors of cognition to become part of the information used to generate the next idea, or to develop the current concept. These simultaneous representations assist and support the mental sorting of information, allowing the designer to consider many other factors required in the process of design (Tovey 1989).

In terms of process, design can also be considered an act of problem solving through trial and error that involves iterations (Roozenburg and Eekels 1995). These steps are repeated as no firm decisions are usually made during the first round of iteration. These iterations occur throughout the design process and involve innovation, analysis, decision-making and evaluation. During this process of iteration, an approximate solution to an initial design problem is worked through, and then fed back into the process for an improved solution. This continues until the desired solution is achieved when more information becomes available, and consequently ceases when all available resources are depleted (Wright 1998). Cross (1984) suggested that design is an open-ended and ill-structured process, having no clear solution at its comencement. Answers cannot be obtained through the use of formulas since the goals, constraints and criteria may be poorly understood in the beginning and often change and evolve as the design progresses. In addition, formulating the problem is difficult because in design, there are no true or false answers. Instead, problems and their solutions are often assessed as being either good or bad, or more or less appropriate.

Design problems therefore are often ill-defined (Dym and Little 2009), whereby an approach is needed to counter the instability of the situation. This is an effect of the ill-structured design problem, and the resulting need to deal with a myriad of potential avenues of development towards possible solutions. This ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Authors
• Glossary
• Chapter 1 Design and design representation
• Chapter 2 Design thinking through representation
• Chapter 3 Design representation in practice
• Chapter 4 Sketches
• Chapter 5 Drawings
• Chapter 6 Models
• Chapter 7 Prototypes
• Chapter 8 Case studies and conclusions
• Index