Design heuristics for target-oriented product development

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The essence of design creativity is to develop solutions for open, complex and ill-defined problems (Gonçalves et al. 2016). For those problems, there is generally no systematic method designers can be provided with in order to derive optimal solutions. In other words, it is neither possible to list all solutions to a given problem nor to prove the absolute superiority of a given solution. In the absence of systematic methods, guidance can be given to designers in the form of heuristics, i.e. solutions which have proven to lead towards satisfactory solutions but which are not guaranteed to be optimal. Great efforts have been made by the international research community in order to identify design strategies, which are in most cases derived from experience, and in most cases follow a defined target in the context of Design for X (DfX), such as environmental aspects (e.g. Telenko et al. 2016). These heuristics aim to extract the essence of respective DfX streams into a summarized knowledge base to be used in concrete design situations or for educational purposes. While many design heuristics have been published throughout scientific literature, less effort has been invested to evaluate their capacity to support actual knowledge transfer. Published heuristics sets are generally weakly structured, difficult to navigate in, partly competing and overlapping, and offer different levels of detail. As a result, they do not offer sufficient clarity and usability to be integrated in daily engineering practice and education. Furthermore, empirical evidence of the influence of heuristics on the design performance remains partial and requires further investigation. The overarching scientific objective of this research project is to enhance the ability of design heuristics to lead to knowledge transfer in product design processes and design education. This requires shedding light on the underlying structure of design heuristics and on the cause/effect relations they express. This requires as well investigating the influence of digitization and visualization on the actual impact of heuristics as well as the ability to characterize this impact. The projected outcomes of the project — a formalism to better describe design heuristics as well as an empirically validated mechanism for heuristic-visualization and interaction — are expected to be valid for the whole engineering domain.