Homework for 3/26

My research paper is important because it outlines how communication plays an enormous role in the engineering design process.  It shows that engineers use much more writing and visual communication than most people realize.  Most engineers take all of it for granted because they don't think of it as writing.  When in reality it is exactly that.  From the start of the start of the design process, engineers need to define their problem that they have to solve and research about previous designs or break it down into simpler pieces.  In order to keep track of all that information they write a lot of it down.  Engineers will also use a house of quality to translate consumer requirements and constraints into engineering constraints.  They think of it as a function of something that they can control.  For example, low weight is a function of density and amount of material.  Engineers can control both of those functions in the design process.  Later on, mostly during the analysis part, engineers will do risk management and effects analysis on the object that they made.  They record where it could fail, how it could fail and how spectacular it will fail.  They do this to keep the product safe and to minimize future problems that might occur with the thing that they are making. So overall, this paper will help me as well as future students to understand what it is they will be learning and using in practice.

One of the main problems I am having with my research paper is that I can not seem to find much in the way of explaining why they do the certain documentation that they do.  There is quite a bit on how it is used but not much on where it originated or why it is this way.

Research Proposal

The Various Communications Used in the Engineering Design Process

Mechanical engineers, much like any other engineer, are tasked with designing and creating various objects with a specific functionality and cost.  “Two heads are better than one” is a philosophy that is often used in the engineering discipline.  For this reason, they will work in teams to create something new or to improve upon an existing object.  This is where the communication plays a major role in the ability to get a job done.  They must be able to relay information between other engineers, engineers and business people as well as engineers and clients or consumers.  Cross discipline communication is one of the hardest ways to get ideas across because what they engineers see is something different than what the business majors see or vice versa.  On top of that, engineers must also be able to record their results and ideas in order to reproduce them later on.  How they accomplish this is in many different ways based on what they are trying to say, who they are talking to and whether or not they are recording information or brainstorming information.

The various ways that mechanical engineers transfer information is based upon who they are trying to communicate with, what they are trying to communicate and when they are trying to communicate it.  There are many different forms, charts and tables that mechanical engineers will use to convey these messages.  They often involve some sort of a visual representation that can be translated into words and ideas.  Visual and oral communications are the main forms that they will use but they also need ways to record those visual and oral conversations.  This leads to copying the visual communications into printed copies and the oral communication turns into more visual communication in the form of charts and drawings.    

Mechanical engineers want simple, straight to the point things that they can pull an answer from easily. Visual communication aids in this process by making it easier, more efficient and quicker to decipher.  Throughout the design process, which starts as soon as a team is tasked with solving a problem, there will be many things said or discussed by the team.  They need a nice way of organizing this, so to solve this problem they came up with ways of recording the ideas for future reference.  As you begin a problem, the team must first ask themselves what their problem means or start by defining it in some way.  They then do research on that topic to discover what ideas have been thought of already or how to break the complex problem even farther down into simpler pieces.  This requires taking notes on what they research.  I will refer to the Deep Dive video throughout the paper as a reference to this design process.  In the beginning of the video, the team called Ideo was tasking with making a new shopping cart.  They researched previous designs, such as what worked or what did not work.  They saw that they had to break down the problem even farther because everyone shops differently.  Some people like to leave their cart at the end of an aisle, grab what they need from that aisle and then return to their cart.  Whereas, other people take their carts everywhere they go.  After research, there is what is called the brainstorming part.  This is exactly what it sounds like, in the sense that they all get together and brainstorm ideas.  The one rule about brainstorming is that you cannot put down an idea and no matter how extreme, silly or obscure an idea is.  Within Ideo, the camera takes a look at how all the engineers will sit in a conference type room and think of crazy ways to improve the shopping cart.  By the end of that brainstorming session, they have too many ideas to use and must consolidate them into a two or three good ideas.  They accomplish this through what is known as a house of quality, morphological matrix and decision matrix.  These tools allow the engineers to qualitatively assess the ideas that were thought of.  Everyone has limitations that they have to work with and engineers are no different.  As with Ideo, they have to make it at low cost so that it will sell, functional for the everyday person to use and keep it with the same dimensions as a normal shopping cart.  These are called constraints.  In the house of quality you take the constraints or requirements that the client desires and put them in the left side.  Then, engineers relate them to a certain function of the object that they are trying to create.  For example, at Ideo, materials is a function of cost because some materials are more expensive than others.  You have control over the material you choose to make it with so you can define materials in the top part of the house of quality.  After all your constraints are dealt with, you look at the relationship between the functions that you defined.  It is a way for engineers to translate consumer words and adjectives into math and science terms.  This is useful so that engineers can easily sort through what they have to accomplish with this project.  Next in the design process is to see which of your secondary designs are good.  You then look to see how your competitors are doing in the categories of things such as price and compare them to you.  Sometimes ideas get combined because if one idea has very low cost but large size and another idea has high cost and small size the you can combine the ideas to make an even better one.  This is where the major engineering analysis comes into play and where most of the communication happens.  This is because ideas are thrown out, changed, combined or redesigned, so to keep it all straight they have to record how they got to it.  After that comes prototyping.  This is where the object is made in a computer software and tested as though it were in real life.  From here they can modify the design so that it performs better and figure out if they need to redesign something.  Communication at this stage is mostly technical drawings which are drawings of the actual object that is to be created.  They have specific standards to communicate lots of information between engineers and manufactures or whoever is making the part(s).  The other form is a chart called failure modes and effects analysis (FMEA).  These are used to calculate the risks of failure in something and how serious it would be if it were to fail.  They are to prevent harm to anyone using the object and to ensure that it will not breakdown.  Nobody wants to buy something is just going to break, nor is someone going to buy something that poses a threat to them.  This is there to prevent all that.  After it is verified that its safe they begin production and the product hits shelves. 

Overall, the communication that mechanical engineers use to convey design intent from the beginning stages of the design process are wide spread but often involve some form of visual communication that can be translated into a meaning that is useful to the engineers

Starns, Gloria (2014, March 6). Personal Interview

This interview was with a Mechanical Engineering professor here at Iowa State University.  She has been teaching for a long time. She teaches a freshman class as well as a senior design class.  This makes her an expert in the field.  During the senior design project, you actually deal with real companies, so she would know about how companies function and what they are looking for.  She taught me what the tools to communicate were so there was not any bias.

Apostolakis, G. E. (2004), "How Useful Is Quantitative Risk Assessment?". Risk Analysis, 24: 515–520.

It takes a look at the use of risk analysis in the designing and production of something.  It focuses mainly on how it is conducted during engineering analysis, how engineers typically account for this risk factor and the advantages and disadvantages of this method.  It seems fairly unbiased because it essentially verifies what Professor Starns told me as well.

Sant'Anna, A.P. (2012) "Probabilistic priority numbers for failure modes and effects analysis".             International Journal of Quality & Reliability Management, 29(3):349 - 362

This article shows how to perform a Failure modes and effects analysis.  These are useful to help prevent the failure of an object.  This explains the procedure, how and why it became a choice for engineers to use.

Temponi, C and Yen, J and Tiao, W.A. (1999), "House of quality: A fuzzy logic-based requirements analysis". European Journal of Operational Research, 117(2):340-354

This paper is very factual.  It agrees with the other sources about house of qualities so this leads me to believe that it does not have any bias, or has very little.  It is a good length article that explains the reason, calculations behind the House of Quality.  It identifies relationships between the different parts and explains why each part is there.  It explains how that it is not an exact science when making this but rather a tool to aid and guide engineers.

Hauser, J.R. and Clausing, D. (1988), "The House of Quality". Harvard Business Review

Although this article is older, it outlines a general design process that is widely used.  It explains why design is so hard and how the house of quality helps engineers to make decisions about which idea they should fund.

Nagamachi, M. (1995), "Kansei Engineering: A new ergonomic consumer-oriented technology for product development". International Journal of Industrial Ergonomics, 5(3)

This article shows how to implement newer design processes.  It shows that although there are different types of design approach.  It explains the product-out and market-in approaches to consumer products.  It shows a different type of communication in the design process.  This paper seems to be more factual and stating results than opinion based, which means less bias.

Tapke, J and Muller, A and Johnson, G and Sieck, J. "House of Quality: Steps in understanding the House of Quality"

This is a simple article that explains the house of quality.  I would use this to corroborate information that I find in other articles to stay with consistent information.

Clearance Chart and Lubrication Diagram. Digital image. N.p., 29 Dec. 2010. Web. 8 Mar. 2014.

This is an example of a technical drawing for an aircraft engine.  I planned on using this as an example when talking about technical drawings in my paper.

Gearyinteractive. "The Deep Dive" Youtube. Youtube, 26 January 2011. Web. 8 March 2014

This is an educational video about an engineering firm that goes through the design process to build a new shopping cart.  It will show the design process and I would refer to it often as a single example for the reader to follow.  It is a ABC Dateline production.  It seems more to function to show the design process rather than persuade the audience in some way.