Thesis (M.S.)--Mississippi State University. Department of Industrial Engineering. / Title from title screen. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M.S.)--Florida State University, 2004. / Advisor: Dr. Patrick Hollis, Florida State University, College of Engineering, Dept. of Mechanical Engineering. Title and description from dissertation home page (viewed June 17, 2004). Includes bibliographical references.

The use of examples in idea generation is a common practice intended to provide inspiration from existing products to the designing of new ones. Examples can be taken from the Internet, engineering textbooks, analogical databases, literature, a company’s prior designs, or from a competitor company, prior work by the designer, and many other sources. These examples are represented in various ways, such as hand sketches, pictures, computer-aided designs (CAD), physical models, activity diagrams, shape grammars, text descriptions, etc. Design representations can also be broken down by function in the form of functional models and decompositions. The use of these visual or physical examples allows engineers to get a clearer picture of how a design or component works and enables them to have a better understanding of the overall design and function. Each representation has inherent advantages and disadvantages in the way that they portray a design. Examples are sources for analogies. Analogies from nature, where biological organisms have solved challenging problems in novel ways, are very useful in engineering idea generation and solution retrieval. This process is called biologically inspired design. Engineers often use biologically inspired design to solve problems while increasing creativity and expanding the solution space. Using this method, engineers are able to learn from nature and apply biological principles to real world engineering problems to make effective designs and produce innovative solutions. It is important to have a clearer understanding of how the use of the representations and characteristics of examples as external stimuli affect the idea generation process in engineering design. Understanding these processes will be invaluable in offering guidelines for how engineering design should be done and what types of external stimuli should be used to allow for innovation and creativity to be enhanced. This dissertation presents four studies that focus on understanding ways that examples can be used to improve the idea generation process. Three of these studies focus on how the representation of externally imposed examples, which may be used as analogues, influences creativity during idea generation while also minimizing design fixation, which occurs when designers adhere to the features of their own initial design solutions or to features of existing examples. The fourth study focuses on the use of examples as sources for analogical mapping and how these examples produce innovative solutions during idea generation. The first study compares CAD, sketch, and photograph representation presented individually. The second study compares CAD and sketch representation presented together, and the third study examines function tree and sketch representations. The fourth study looks at the real-world context and impact of examples used as sources for analogical mapping to inspire innovative solutions. The results of the studies show that CAD representations of good examples are effective in allowing engineers to identify the key working principles of a design and help to develop higher quality design concepts. CAD representations also cause more fixation to the example’s features. Function trees do not cause nor break fixation compared to a control condition, but do reduce fixation compared with sketches. Biological examples can be successfully used as analogues during engineering idea generation to create novel and effective design solutions to relevant and real-world engineering problems.

This thesis describes a method for measuring the innovation capabilities of mechanical engineering students and presents the results of a yearlong experiment. A review of relevant literature shows that it is unclear whether the innovation capabilities of engineering students increase or decrease over time. Experiments were conducted at two universities in which students were asked to redesign an everyday electromechanical product in a sketch-based concept generation activity. Student participants were also asked to complete a self-efficacy survey. Nearly one thousand concepts were generated from a combination of freshmen and seniors. The concepts were evaluated for originality, technical feasibility, and innovation characteristics by multiple raters. At both schools, the findings suggest that the senior-level engineering students are more creative than their freshman-level counterparts without sacrificing technical feasibility. Additionally, the seniors rated higher for originality at the end of the semester than they scored prior to taking their senior design class. These results suggest that the mechanical engineering curricula, and especially the senior-level Engineering Design courses, are having a positive effect on student creativity. / text

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Reverse engineering is broadly defined as the process of analyzing existing products to learn how to create better products in the future. Including reverse engineering as part of the engineering design process can provide a number of benefits, including a more thorough understanding of existing products, lower cost for the redesign of products, and faster times to market. While reverse engineering can be applied to a wide range of domains, this thesis deals with methodologies for extracting technical data from electro-mechanical products for the purpose of recreating them functionally and dimensionally, to an acceptable level of accuracy. An integrated and evolved reverse engineering methodology is presented. This new methodology is built upon previous work, and results from an effort to integrate all previous methods into the simplest and most useful form. Five novel reverse engineering techniques are introduced to solve problems previously unaddressed in the literature: Bounding Pertinent Geometry, Reassembly by Function, Determining Sample Size, Estimating Production Volume and Accounting for Physical Degradation. Throughout the thesis, a running example of the reverse engineering of the Craftsman Auto Hammer is used to illustrate the application of the evolved methodology. / text

Optimal engineering design specifications are usually derived from an iterative design process. Here, different mathematical programs, each representing a particular problem assumption, are solved in order to gain insight into how and why an ideal design changes as model parameters vary. The mathematical technique used in this process is termed sensitivity analysis. The focus of this study is on techniques for performing such analysis on optimization problems which can be modeled as geometric programs. A dual based computationally attractive numerical procedure was developed to generate the locus of optimal solutions to prototype geometric programs corresponding to a large set of program parameter trajectories. Coefficient variation can include individual or simultaneous changes in any or all cost and exponent values. Sensitivity analysis is accomplished by numerically solving a specially constructed nonlinear initial value differential equation problem. Computational procedures were developed for computing an intitial value point, differential equation construction and solution, primal/dual conversion and problem reconstruction in the event of a primal constraint status change. A computer program written to carry out this scheme was described and used in the design of a batch process chemical plant. Preliminary results show the sensitivity analysis procedure developed in this study is attractive in terms of required computation time and perturbation flexibility of model coefficients.

No description available.

Creativity is important in the design and manufacture of successful products, yet neither creativity nor the early stages of design are well understood. This lack of understanding limits the tools that can be developed to support the crucial earlier stages of design that ultimately determine product success. My research aims to better understand creativity by studying and quantifying the potential of semantic stimuli (words) presented during concept generation. Natural language was chosen as design stimuli because language provides a systematic framework for stimuli generation. Furthermore, natural language is ubiquitous and intimately related to cognitive functions required in design such as reasoning and memory. Ultimately, the results of this research will assist in the development of early-design support tools. In a series of four experiments, the effects of semantic stimuli oppositely and similarly related to the experiment problem were examined with respect to creativity and designers’ language patterns. Results show that opposite-stimulus concepts were significantly more creative than similar-stimulus concepts. It also was observed that opposite stimuli elicited designer behaviours that may encourage creative concepts. These results suggest that the use of oppositely related stimulus words is a practical method for encouraging creative design.

Creativity is important in the design and manufacture of successful products, yet neither creativity nor the early stages of design are well understood. This lack of understanding limits the tools that can be developed to support the crucial earlier stages of design that ultimately determine product success. My research aims to better understand creativity by studying and quantifying the potential of semantic stimuli (words) presented during concept generation. Natural language was chosen as design stimuli because language provides a systematic framework for stimuli generation. Furthermore, natural language is ubiquitous and intimately related to cognitive functions required in design such as reasoning and memory. Ultimately, the results of this research will assist in the development of early-design support tools. In a series of four experiments, the effects of semantic stimuli oppositely and similarly related to the experiment problem were examined with respect to creativity and designers’ language patterns. Results show that opposite-stimulus concepts were significantly more creative than similar-stimulus concepts. It also was observed that opposite stimuli elicited designer behaviours that may encourage creative concepts. These results suggest that the use of oppositely related stimulus words is a practical method for encouraging creative design.