Jonathan Maier - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Papers by Jonathan Maier

Mechanical Engineering, 2008

This article reviews a concept borrowed from psychology that has given perspectives on product de... more This article reviews a concept borrowed from psychology that has given perspectives on product development. Much progress has been made in new areas opened by the systems-level approach to engineering design. Among them are advancements in our understanding of decision-making, ideation, collaboration, modularity, requirements modeling, lifecycle considerations, robust design, green design, and various other "design for x" strategies. The rethinking of design that is needed now is a conceptual basis that allows engineers to better describe and solve problems at the system level, problems that involve user interaction. The concept we propose to deal with these problems is affordance, a term borrowed from perceptual psychology and popularized by the psychologist Donald Norman is his book The Design of Everyday Things. As the theoretical tenets of design are brought up to date with the increasing demands of systems-level design, systems integration, global marketplaces, new ma...

Unifying Themes in Complex Systems, 2010

Design Studies, 2009

The idea of affordance, borrowed from perceptual psychology, is applied to the domain of architec... more The idea of affordance, borrowed from perceptual psychology, is applied to the domain of architecture. As to architectural theory, affordances can be used as a conceptual framework to understand the relationship between environments and occupants, especially with respect to form and function. Regarding architectural design, the concept of affordance allows for a common theoretical basis to improve the design process. Concerning architectural practice, affordances can be used as a tool to explore the connection between the intentions of the design with how the artifact is actually used, leading to archived knowledge, and the potential for avoiding common design failures.

The science of engineering design has often been studied with the same scientific tools as other ... more The science of engineering design has often been studied with the same scientific tools as other domain of interest in engineering, such as mechanics and thermodynamics. However, design presents a host of issues not present in other engineering domains, issues such as human creativity and decision-making, uncertainty, changing market conditions, and synthesis. Taken together, these and many more issues are evidence of the complex nature of design in general. This paper addresses this inherent complexity in design by applying concepts and tools from the relatively new science of complexity. The designer-artifact-user system is defined as the complex system of interest, and then this system is analyzed using ideas from complexity science. A number of unsolved issues in design, including several important trade-offs, are understood as parallel issues that have not yet been solved for any complex system. Further, several important insights into design are also gained from complexity science, including the idea of "designing on the edge of chaos," pursuing suboptimal "satisficing" solutions, and strategies for matching timescales within the designerartifact-user system. Finally several open areas of future research into applying complexity science to design science are identified, including the development of methodological, as well as computational tools.

In this paper we discuss the conceptual basis for an integrated design environment that includes ... more In this paper we discuss the conceptual basis for an integrated design environment that includes computationally intensive activities (simulation, analysis, solid modeling), as well as less computationally intensive activities (problem definition, requirements modeling, rationale capture), etc. Moreover, geometric information and semantic information are linked in this environment, in a seamless framework that empowers the designer to create geometries, create semantic relationships, and trace and manipulate the connections between geometric entities and semantic relations of interest. Toward this goal, a computational environment that supports semantically rich design is described. In this paper we discuss the concept of affordance as a relational formalism to capture semantic information. We also discuss exemplar technology as an appropriate formalism to manipulate semantic information within a CAD environment. Current CAD systems do not allow for artifacts to be placed in context. Various contexts include the artifact's use by people, the artifact's relationship in the environment (especially with respect to sustainability issues), how the artifact is manufactured, and the artifact's life cycle issues such as maintenance, recycling, eventual disposal, etc. These various contexts for the artifact are semantically rich. A geometric description alone does not carry semantic information. In our framework, design exemplars implement affordances in the computational environment, thus providing a mechanism to tie concrete product information to contextual information thereby enabling the capture and manipulation of semantic information within the computational environment.

Proceedings of 9th International DSM Conference, 2007

International Conference for Engineering Design, Paris, France, 2007

The practice of requirements capture, modeling, and management is more advanced in some fields, s... more The practice of requirements capture, modeling, and management is more advanced in some fields, such as software engineering, than is currently evidenced in the field of engineering design. This situation is due in part to the increased number of domains that engineering problems span. Software designers, for example, need not concern themselves with physical working principles, material selection, environmental regulations, safety tests, and so forth. To address this situation, we describe a matrix based hierarchical requirements modeling scheme capturing seven domains of interest to engineering design problems. We illustrate how the application of our modeling scheme can foster engineering innovation through examples drawn from automobile subsystems .

The discipline of design in the field of Mechanical Engineering has changed dramatically in the l... more The discipline of design in the field of Mechanical Engineering has changed dramatically in the last few decades. From the nineteenth through the mid-twentieth century, design classes focused on drafting and on dimensioning. Classes on design of machine elements complemented theories related to mechanics of materials, including failure theories, fatigue, and somewhat obliquely the ability of components to achieve some function. With the advent of the modern digital computer, and in response to a consumer society that pushes products to do more, the discipline of design has adapted. Computer Aided Design tools have been developed, together with analysis tools with ever improving accuracy and abilities. Simulation, visualization, and prototyping have become available, and together with the evolving field of optimization, these tools help the engineer accomplish more with less, to stretch the boundaries of the possible, and to help designers make better and more informed decisions. The main consequence of this evolution is the ability to design artifacts that range from simple and elegant to robust and extremely complex. The increasing complexity level of modern products poses special demands on designers as it challenges them to bridge disciplines, bringing computers and other electronics into devices, and to develop ever better, ever lighter, ever stronger designs. Thus engineering schools now teach students how to use computers to draw complex artifacts, and while schools still teach mechanics and machine elements, the modern mechanical engineering curriculum now includes courses in numerical analysis, optimization, and the process of design and decision making. Simon [13] was one of the early proponents of studying design as a science. Throughout his

Volume 3: 11th International Conference on Design Theory and Methodology, 1999

Today’s highly competitive, global marketplace is redefining the way companies do business. Many ... more Today’s highly competitive, global marketplace is redefining the way companies do business. Many companies are being faced with the challenge of providing as much variety as possible for the market with as little variety as possible between products in order to maintain economies of scale while satisfying a wide range of customer requirements. Developing a family of products — a group of related products derived from a common product platform — provides an efficient and effective means to realize sufficient product variety to satisfy a range of customer demands. In this paper the Product Platform Concept Exploration Method (PPCEM) is presented, providing a Method that facilitates the synthesis and Exploration of a common Product Platform Concept that can be scaled into an appropriate family of products. As an example, the PPCEM is employed to design a family of universal electric motors that are also compared against a benchmark group of individually designed motors. The focus in th...

2017 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition Proceedings

As a doctoral student, she studied breast tissue engineering and was an Instructor for the Clemso... more As a doctoral student, she studied breast tissue engineering and was an Instructor for the Clemson University General Engineering Program. She also participated in the NSF's Innovation Corps for Learning (I-Corps L) program and was a research mentor through National Science Foundation's Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) and Research Experience and Mentoring (REM).

Understanding Complex Systems

The powerful concept of complexity can be applied to help us understand not only modern engineeri... more The powerful concept of complexity can be applied to help us understand not only modern engineering systems, but also the design of those systems, and artifacts in general. In this chapter we attempt to establish a two-pronged theoretical framework for understanding the complexity of design. By design we mean the activity of designing artifacts in general, not any specific class of artifact. The first route to understanding the complexity of design is based on a fundamental exploration of what it means for a system to be complex. This avenue is essentially mathematical in character, and for it we rely heavily on the works of Robert Rosen, Nicholas Rashevsky, and Peter Wegner. Having discussed briefly the foundations of this approach, it is then applied to the science of design. In particular, the goal is to show that design in general is a member of the class of systems that are formally described as open and complex, and not a member of the class of systems that are formally described as closed and algorithmic. This amounts to theoretical validation for adopting a paradigm for using an open relational concept, such as affordance, as a basis for design, rather than a closed algorithmic concept such as function. This approach also suggests abstract affordance based descriptive models of design as alternatives to the current function based models of design. The second route to understanding the complexity of design lies in the study of systems that are in some obvious way complex. This approach is essentially empirical in character. Accordingly, the goal here is to show that design exhibits similar characteristics to other complex systems, in particular, as will be shown, a class of complex systems known as Complex Adaptive Systems (CAS). This constitutes more

Artificial Intelligence for Engineering Design, Analysis and Manufacturing, 2015

Research in Engineering Design, 2009

Rather than developing methods to address problems as they occur, the effort in this paper is to ... more Rather than developing methods to address problems as they occur, the effort in this paper is to formulate methods based on an explicit theory. Methods developed in this way have more scientific rigor because underlying propositions and assumptions are clearly articulated, thus the applicability and limitations of the methods are well defined. The underlying theory used in this work is that of affordancebased design, which has been developed by the authors in a recent series of papers, and is based in turn on the theory of affordances from perceptual psychology. This paper extends affordance-based design into prescriptive methods. A broad affordance-based design process is introduced together with methods for documenting affordances, methods for designing individual affordances, an affordance-based method for reverse engineering and redesign, the affordance structure matrix, and affordance-based selection matrices. Engineering examples used to illustrate the methods include the high level design of an automobile, comfort to automobile passengers, the meshing of gears, wear of gears, a vacuum cleaner, and automotive window switches.

Volume 5: 25th International Conference on Design Theory and Methodology; ASME 2013 Power Transmission and Gearing Conference, 2013

This paper describes the development and evolution of research themes in the Design Theory and Me... more This paper describes the development and evolution of research themes in the Design Theory and Methodology (DTM) conference. Essays containing reflections on the history of DTM, supported by an analysis of session titles and papers winning the “best paper award”, describe the development of the research themes. A second set of essays describes the evolution of several key research themes. Two broad trends in research themes are evident, with a third one emerging. The topics of the papers in the first decade or so reflect an underlying aim to apply artificial intelligence toward developing systems that could ‘design’. To do so required understanding how human designers behave, formalizing design processes so that they could be computed, and formalizing representations of design knowledge. The themes in the first DTM conference and the recollections of the DTM founders reflect this underlying aim. The second decade of DTM saw the emergence of product development as an underlying conce...

Volume 8: 14th Design for Manufacturing and the Life Cycle Conference; 6th Symposium on International Design and Design Education; 21st International Conference on Design Theory and Methodology, Parts A and B, 2009

The Affordance Structure Matrix (ASM) is a concept exploration and attention directing tool to en... more The Affordance Structure Matrix (ASM) is a concept exploration and attention directing tool to enable designers to take advantage of the special properties of affordances, such as form dependence and polarity of positive and negative affordances. However, in an ASM, as in other popular matrix based tools, the entities being mapped (in the case of an ASM, affordances and components, respectively) are typically assumed to be of equal importance. In this paper we present a comparative study of various quantitative scales used to populate ASMs. By using these scales, we can capture the relative importance of different affordances, for example that cutting the user is more important to avoid than annoying the user with noise. Also, by using scales of increased granularity for populating the interior of an ASM, the relative strength of relationships between product components and individual components can be captured. For example, larger, heavier components have a stronger relationship wi...

Research in Engineering Design, 2001

In this paper we focus on scale-based product families derived from scalable product platforms th... more In this paper we focus on scale-based product families derived from scalable product platforms that can be exploited from both a functional and a manufacturing standpoint to increase the potential bene®ts of having a common platform. While many companies have been successful with scalable product platforms, few, if any, have instituted a systematic approach to design (i) the product platform and (ii) the corresponding family of products which are scaled around the product platform. Accordingly, in this paper we address the following question: How can a scalable product platform and its resulting product family be ef®ciently and effectively modeled, analyzed, and designed? After a comprehensive review of the literature we introduce the Product Platform Concept Exploration Method (PPCEM) which has been developed to facilitate the design of a family of products based on a scalable product platform. By way of illustration, we design a family of ten universal electric motors that are scaled around a common motor platform to realize a variety of torque requirements. Further, to mitigate the paucity of examples in this domain, we provide detailed information for the universal electric motor example to enable other researchers to benchmark their methods with this example. We evaluate the effectiveness of the PPCEM by comparing the family of motors obtained using the PPCEM to a group of individually optimized motors. We evaluate the ef®ciency of the PPCEM by comparing the computational expense of designing the family of motors using the PPCEM to that of optimizing each motor individually. We conclude that the PPCEM provides an ef®cient and effective means to design a scalable product platform and corresponding product family, promoting increased commonality within the product family with minimal performance tradeoff. Keywords Product family á Product platform á Commonality á Universal electric motor Nomenclature A wa Cross-sectional area of armature wire (mm 2) A wf Cross-sectional area of ®eld wire (mm 2)

Journal of Intelligent Manufacturing, 2007

Abstract The realization that designing products in families can and does have significant techno... more Abstract The realization that designing products in families can and does have significant technological and economic advantages over traditional single product design has motivated increasing interest in recent years in formal design tools and methodologies for product family design. However, currently there is no guidance for designers in the first key strategic decisions of product family design, in particular determining the type of product family to design. Hence, in this paper, first a taxonomy of different types of product families ...