There have been numerous researchers who, over the years, have explored the relationship between the golden ratio and how it relates to the human perception of beauty. Although the golden proportion is one of the aesthetic characteristics contained in many masterpieces of art and design, it is still largely thought of as little more than an aesthetic guideline, that is, if indeed it is even being considered at all. This thesis asserts that golden proportion and practical geometric knowledge can be used as an extremely effective means of codifying the creative process, inspiring and influencing creative design decisions. This thesis is concerned with examining the application of practical geometric knowledge as an integral part of the design process. It also documents the development of the author's geometric refinement tools and discusses the results of their performance in testing by scrutinizing the opinions of design students and professional designers who both had their designs modified by the author's refinement tools. The relationship between geometric knowledge embedded in design classics and bestselling items was also examined. This thesis describes a mixed methods approach with multiple analyses, from which qualitative and quantitative data (about the implementation of applying geometric knowledge) was gathered via two geometry workshops, interviews with the professional designers, as well as an analysis of visual materials consisting of two hundred selected design examples. Based upon the process of employing geometric knowledge and its experiments, the thesis presents a descriptive analysis of the data to test theoretical propositions and draw conclusions about the value of applying practical geometry as design knowledge and as a practical tool for a design in the modern context. The significance of this thesis is that it elucidates upon the use of the golden ratio, and practical geometry as a practical design refinement tool, with the ability to transform the perception of practical geometry from being merely an aesthetic guideline which appears in masterpieces from the past, to a directly applicable practical design technique. The main contribution this thesis makes to the field of design practice is that it attempts to further understand the results achieved by codifying designing styles and design decisions, a process which can be described as objective rational knowledge in practice. This thesis frames individual design participants' perspectives of the golden ratio and the relationship between modern designs and the masterpieces of history. Thereby, hopefully providing a historical perspective and a modern context for the golden ratio. Further to that, it is the author's hope that this work will provide inspiration to today's designers, motivating them to begin implementing practical geometry into their designs and in the future generations of design education to come.

The importance of integrating design and manufacturing becomes apparent when the increase in the degree of difficulty of change is observed as the product development proceeds from concept to production in a serial engineering process. The greatest opportunity in design for manufacture occurs at the initial design stage before any commitments to tooling and equipment have been made. This research develops a framework and an implementation system dealing with integration of design, manufacturing and economic aspects in the development of a product. The objective is to evaluate process technology for a specified product design and to identify the best work/tool material combination and production conditions to optimize the production process. A commercial CAD/CAM package (SmartCAM) playing roles as a part design tool, a processing time simulator, and a NC code generator is integrated with a manufacturing database, and a machining cost model. This integrated system runs in Microsoft Windows environment under an external program which not only coordinates the activities of various modules but also enhances the capabilities of SmartCAM. This system allows product design evaluation for economic and technical criteria and recommends best manufacturing environment. An NC program containing recommended machining parameters is generated. Furthermore, the system reports on tool wear on each tool per part manufactured. This information is useful for cost analysis as well as for producing a tool replacement schedule. / Graduation date: 1995

The Production Switching Heuristic (PSH) developed by Mellichamp and Love (1978) has been suggested as a more realistic, practical and intuitively appealing approach to aggregate production planning (APP). In this research, PSH has been modified to present a more sophisticated open grid search procedure for solving the APP problem. The effectiveness of this approach has been demonstrated by determining a better near-optimal solution to the classic paint factory problem using a personal computer based application written in THINK PASCAL. The performance of the modified production switching heuristic is then compared in the context of the paint factory problem with results obtained by other prominent APP models including LDR, PPP, and PSH to conclude that the modified PSH offers a better minimum cost solution than the original PSH model. / Graduation date: 1992

Video game development is a high-risk effort with low probability of success. The interactive nature of the resulting artifact increases production complexity, often doing so in ways that are unexpected. New methodologies are needed to address issues in this domain.<p> Video game development has two major phases: preproduction and production. During <i>preproduction</i>, the game designer and other members of the creative team create and capture a vision of the intended player experience in the game design document. The game design document tells the story and describes the game - it does not usually explicitly elaborate all of the details of the intended player experience, particularly with respect to how the player is intended to feel as the game progresses. Details of the intended experience tend to be communicated verbally, on an as-needed basis during iterations of the production effort.<p> During <i>production</i>, the software and media development teams attempt to realize the preproduction vision in a game artifact. However, the game design document is not traditionally intended to capture production-ready requirements, particularly for software development. As a result, there is a communications chasm between preproduction and production efforts that can lead to production issues such as excessive reliance on direct communication with the game designer, difficulty scoping project elements, and difficulty in determining reasonably accurate effort estimates.<p> We posit that defining and capturing the intended player experience in a manner that is influenced and informed by established requirements engineering principles and techniques will help cross the communications chasm between preproduction and production. The proposed experience requirements methodology is a novel contribution composed of:<p> <ol> <li>a model for the elements that compose experience requirements,</li> <li>a framework that provides guidance for expressing experience requirements, and</li> <li>an exemplary process for the elicitation, capture, and negotiation of experience requirements.</li> <ol><p> Experience requirements capture the designer' s intent for the user experience; they represent user experience goals for the artifact and constraints upon the implementation and are not expected to be formal in the mathematical sense. Experience requirements are evolutionary in intent - they incrementally enhance and extend existing practices in a relatively lightweight manner using language and representations that are intended to be mutually acceptable to preproduction and to production.

Video game development is a high-risk effort with low probability of success. The interactive nature of the resulting artifact increases production complexity, often doing so in ways that are unexpected. New methodologies are needed to address issues in this domain.<p> Video game development has two major phases: preproduction and production. During <i>preproduction</i>, the game designer and other members of the creative team create and capture a vision of the intended player experience in the game design document. The game design document tells the story and describes the game - it does not usually explicitly elaborate all of the details of the intended player experience, particularly with respect to how the player is intended to feel as the game progresses. Details of the intended experience tend to be communicated verbally, on an as-needed basis during iterations of the production effort.<p> During <i>production</i>, the software and media development teams attempt to realize the preproduction vision in a game artifact. However, the game design document is not traditionally intended to capture production-ready requirements, particularly for software development. As a result, there is a communications chasm between preproduction and production efforts that can lead to production issues such as excessive reliance on direct communication with the game designer, difficulty scoping project elements, and difficulty in determining reasonably accurate effort estimates.<p> We posit that defining and capturing the intended player experience in a manner that is influenced and informed by established requirements engineering principles and techniques will help cross the communications chasm between preproduction and production. The proposed experience requirements methodology is a novel contribution composed of:<p> <ol> <li>a model for the elements that compose experience requirements,</li> <li>a framework that provides guidance for expressing experience requirements, and</li> <li>an exemplary process for the elicitation, capture, and negotiation of experience requirements.</li> <ol><p> Experience requirements capture the designer' s intent for the user experience; they represent user experience goals for the artifact and constraints upon the implementation and are not expected to be formal in the mathematical sense. Experience requirements are evolutionary in intent - they incrementally enhance and extend existing practices in a relatively lightweight manner using language and representations that are intended to be mutually acceptable to preproduction and to production.

This study is focused on two-sided assembly line balancing problems of type-I and type-II. This problem is encountered in production environments where a two-sided assembly line is used to produce physically large products. For type-I problems, there is a specified production target for a fixed time interval and the objective is to reach this production capacity with the minimum assembly line length used. On the other hand, type-II problem focuses on reaching the maximum production level using a fixed assembly line and workforce. Two different mathematical models for each problem type are developed to optimally solve the problems. Since the quality of the solutions by mathematical models decreases for large-sized problems due to time and memory limitations, two heuristic approaches are presented for solving large-sized type-I problem. The validity of all formulations is verified with the small-sized literature problems and the performances of the methods introduced are tested with large-sized literature problems.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of North Texas, Aug., 2008. / Title from title page display. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M.S.)--California Polytechnic State University, 2009. / Title from PDF title page; viewed on December 17, 2009. Major professor: Reza Pouraghabagher, Ph.D. "Presented to the faculty of California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo." "In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree [of] Master of Science in Industrial Engineering." "September 2009." Includes bibliographical references (p. 38-42). Also available on microfiche.

Effective management of engineering productivity is critical to achieving overall project success (CII 2001). Although engineering cost has approached to the level of 20 percent of a project’s total cost on some industrial projects, engineering productivity is not well understood. For these reasons, the Construction Industry Institute (CII) developed an Engineering Productivity Measurement System (EPMS) that consists of quantity-based metrics to directly measure engineering productivity, and drive continuous performance improvement. However, barriers to system implementation exist. Productivity metrics in the EPMS are measured for various disciplines and thus evaluating overall productivity was initially difficult because of the lack of a summary metric. Because the EPMS is still new to the industry, limited understanding of its metrics has presented a challenge to gaining acceptance for its use in benchmarking. This has inhibited the realization of its potential for supporting improvement. Now that a dataset for the EPMS has been compiled, however, analyses can be performed to support research and the resulting findings will help to overcome implementation barriers of the EPMS. The author developed this research with data from the EPMS and input from industry. Feedback was collected in CII training sessions, committee meetings, and industry forums. The researcher undertook quantitative analyses using the EPMS data. The results will assist industry practitioners to effectively monitor and manage engineering process to reach project success. Four main objectives were achieved in this study: 1) discipline and project level indices to summarize engineering productivity were constructed; 2) influence factors as a foundation of engineering productivity improvement were identified; 3) discipline information dependencies were measured quantitatively; and 4) the associations between engineering productivity and project performance were documented. / text

published_or_final_version / Civil Engineering / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy