In a global, knowledge-driven economy, technological innovation and the transformation of new knowledge into products, processes, and services are critical to competitiveness and productivity growth. Meeting these challenges requires significant advancement in our understanding of the fundamentals of the product design process. Oregon State University has a unique set of faculty who focus on engineering design theory and methodology with the following objectives:
- Developing a fundamental set of principles to enhance the practice of design across the broad spectrum of engineered products through the creation of new tools and methods;
- Developing methodologies to enable a total system, life-cycle context view of design to advance our understanding of the analysis of design alternatives, modeling of uncertainty in decision-making and the relationship between data and knowledge;
- Creating the framework for comprehensive models and their integration, starting with the high-level conceptual design stage; and establishing the methods and measures by which the models can be validated;
- Developing tools and models for concurrent design environments to enable the integration of information technologies, automation, visualization with concurrent design, as well as understanding of team dynamics and negotiation mechanisms during decision-making.
Our research focuses on model-based design, customer-driven functional design, risk-based design, design for the lifecycle, collaborative and distributed design, and design tools to include customer sensory response. |
