Research in Engineering Design 13 (2002) 55±64

DOI 10.1007/s00163-001-0007-4

Toward the ideal mechanical engineering design support system

David G. Ullman

55
Abstract This paper details the progress toward the devel- In doing so, it summarizes what is known and what needs
opment of the ideal mechanical engineering design support to be studied. Finally, it discusses how CAD systems have
system. It attempts to look at the gap between the needs of a evolved to support increasing portions of the activities that
mechanical engineer and what is currently available on CAD are used to develop products.
systems. Since the term CAD emphasizes that the computer The term CAD emphasizes that the computer is an aid to
is an aid to the human designer, this paper is designer- the human designer, so this paper is designer-centric. It is
centric. It is based heavily on the activities performed by based heavily on the activities performed by designers and
designers and the types of information developed by them. the types of information developed by them. In many ways,
Seventeen goals for the ideal mechanical design support this is an update of two earlier papers, ``The importance of
system are listed. These are directed at the types of infor- drawing in the mechanical design process'' [29] and ``Issues
mation developed during the design process and the activ- critical to the development of design history, design ratio-
ities used to develop them. For each of the seventeen, nale and design intent systems'' [31]. The latter paper
background information, the current state-of-the-art, and developed 13 outstanding issues that needed to be resolved
opportunities for future development are itemized. to realize the capture and query of engineering design
information as a potential for improving the design process
Keywords Mechanical engineering design, CAD, Support and the reuse of design information.
system The foundation for the ®rst paper was the study of the
marks made on paper by ®ve mechanical design engineers
1 of varying backgrounds and experience. They were each
Introduction given the initial speci®cations for one of two fairly simple,
This paper summarizes the progress made toward the yet realistic, mechanical design problems taken from pro-
development of the ideal mechanical engineering design fessional practice. The engineers were requested to think
support system. For nearly 30 years, computer-aided de- aloud as they solved the problems. Their verbal reports,
sign (CAD) systems have been touted by their developers drawings, and gestures were video and audio taped for a
as systems that support engineering designers developing period of 6±10 h. The taped data were then transcribed to
products. CAD systems have had a major impact on how obtain a ``protocol'' of the design session. Each designer
design is accomplished in the workplace. This being said, made numerous drawings during his or her solution of the
there is amazingly little formal research on the effects of problem. All of these were on paper. CAD systems were not
these systems on the designers and on the ®nal products.1 used in the study because none of the designers used CAD in
This paper presents a structure for discussing these effects. their daily practice, and its use would have added another
variable to an already complex experiment.
From the more than 40 h of data taken, 15 sections were
Received: 11 February 2000 / Revised: 9 December 2000 /
selected that represented typical conceptual, layout, detail
Accepted: 19 September 2001 / Published online: 13 November 2001 and selection design for each subject. The 15 sections of
Ó Springer-Verlag 2001 protocol data consisted of 174 min of data. The data were
analyzed to explore the observations that drawings are
D.G. Ullman used to:
Emeritus Professor of Machine Design,
Department of Mechanical Engineering,
Oregon State University; 1. Archive the geometric form of the design.
President, Robust Decisions Inc., 800 Starker Ave., Corvallis, 2. Communicate ideas between designers and between the
Oregon 97330, USA designers and manufacturing personnel.
E-mail: ullman@robustdecisions.com 3. Act as an analysis tool. Often, missing dimensions and
Autodesk funded this paper; however, the opinions and conclusions tolerances are calculated on the drawing as it is devel-
stated represent those of the author and are based primarily on his oped.
work.
4. Simulate the design.
1
5. Serve as a completeness checker. As sketches or other
A recent, and believed to be thorough, effort to locate all work on drawings are being made, the details left to be designed
this topic yielded only eight studies; most of them focused on 2-D
systems [1, 15, 17, 18, 22, 23, 24, 25]. The author could ®nd no become apparent to the designer. This, in effect, helps
published study on the effect of parametric systems. establish an agenda of design tasks left to accomplish.
 Res Eng Design 13 (2002)

6. Act as an extension of the designer's short-term the designer) and an external environment (outside the
memory. Designers often unconsciously make sketches mind of the designer). Within the designer, two locations
to help them remember ideas that they might otherwise correspond to the two different kinds of memory: short-
forget. term memory (STM) and long-term memory (LTM).
External to the designer, there are many ``design storage
The 1990 paper re®ned and supported these observa- locations'' including graphical representation media such
tions. Additionally, although the subjects did not use CAD as pieces of paper and CAD tools, as well as other media
systems, the results suggested that: such as textual notes, handbooks, and colleagues. Each
location has certain properties that affect how it can be
1. CAD systems must allow for sketching input. used in design.
2. CAD systems must allow for a variety of interfaces for Detail on the characteristics of the STM and the LTM is
56 the designer. This does not mean more ways to de®ne a based on Newell and Simon's model [20]. Extensions have
circle, but an effort to match the interface and the im- been made to it for visual imagery [11,12,13] and efforts
age on the CAD system to that needed by the designer. have been made to codify it [2]. It must be realized that the
3. CAD systems must recognize domain-dependent contents of the model given here are not fully agreed to in
features and treat them as entities. the cognitive psychology community, but they are cer-
4. CAD tools need to be able to manage constraints (even tainly secure enough to provide a basis for discussing the
abstract and functional constraints) and ensure their role of CAD in mechanical design.
satisfaction, as it is evident that human designers are
cognitively limited in this ability.
2.1
Short-term memory
Since that paper was written, CAD systems have matured
Short-term memory is very fast and powerful. The contents
and have addressed, at least to some degree, all four of the
of the STM are the information we are aware of, that is, our
conclusions. However, even the most recent systems are a
conscious mind. All design operations (e.g., visual
long way from the ideal mechanical engineering design
perception and drawing creation) are based on information
support system. In this paper, the ideal system will be
in the STM. Unfortunately, the STM has limited capacity.
described and progress toward this ideal discussed.
Studies show that it is limited to approximately seven
2 cognitive units or chunks of information. During design,
A model of design problem solving these chunks are visual images of forms, information about
It may someday be possible for a designer to put on a function, mental models of ®t, steps to represent an idea in
``thinking cap'' that can take his or her thoughts and de- a CAD system, or other discrete pieces of information.
velop a hardware representation. Research on under- Although limited in capacity, the STM is a fast processor
standing cognitive processes, CAD, and rapid prototyping with processing times on the order of 100 ms [4].
is certainly moving in that direction. This ideal implies
that we can formulate concepts in our heads that are 2.2
suf®ciently well formed to warrant hardware. It also as- Long-term memory
sumes that CAD systems are suf®ciently developed to take The long-term memory, on the other hand, has essentially
our thoughts and manage the evolution of parts and as- in®nite capacity, but access is slow. Access to LTM is also
semblies. CAD system development will require an un- not direct. Memories must be triggered by some cue or
derstanding of the cognitive workings of designers so that retrieval strategy based on information in STM. During
the transition from thought to representation is possible. design, parts of the design are stored in LTM. These are
To explore what is known about this link, consider the relatively easy to cue because, at any time, currently im-
relationship between the human problem solver and the portant parts of the design are in the STM and can act as
external environment shown in Fig. 1. This ®gure is based pointers for the knowledge in the LTM.
on the model developed by Newell and Simon [20] and is
called the information processing system (IPS). The ®gure 2.3
is a simple ``map'' of where information about the design is External environment
developed and stored. The ®gure shows an internal, In the experiments run in 1990 [29], it was clear that many
human problem-solving environment (inside the mind of drawing actions were not used to document the results of

Fig. 1. The problem solving environ-

ments
D.G. Ullman: Toward the ideal mechanical engineering design support system

the design activity but were part of the design process body and detail to the architecture. Often designers ®rst
itself. If the subjects could have performed these activities develop the general architecture of the object being de-
in their heads they would have done so without making the signed, then add details about shape and ®t.
sketches, notes, and calculations on paper. Thus, it is
concluded that the external environment is often used as Where we are today. Engineers generally work from the
an extension of the STM and LTM. It is critical that the function of a system, to the architecture of an assembly, to
media used in this environment support the designer's the shape of parts. Function occurs primarily at the con-
cognition. Itemizing the match or mismatch between the nections or ®ts between the parts in an assembly. In other
media and human cognition is one of the objectives of this words, function is developed in assemblies. This being
paper. said, CAD systems have primarily supported the form or
The approach taken in this paper is to ®rst describe the geometry development of parts.
57
types of information managed (Sect. 3) and then discuss the Paper-and-pencil allows easy sketching of architecture
activities performed by the external environment support- with stick ®gures and their evolution to components.
ing the designer (Sect. 4). The types of information and Paper-and-pencil also supports limited function modeling
activities are developed in terms of the capabilities of an through sketching actions that show motion or ¯ow in
ideal system. Each subsection begins with statements about assemblies [9,14].
what the ideal engineering design support system should Both 2-D CAD systems and paper-and-pencil are limited
do. Supporting information follows these statements. Next, to simple input of line segments to represent the edges of
there is a description of how paper-and-pencil, 2-D CAD components. Solid modeling systems are still component-
systems, solid-modeling systems, parametric systems, and oriented even though they support the representation of
other support tools meet the ideal. Each subsection edges, surfaces, and solids. Parametric systems greatly
concludes with opportunities for improvement. improved the modeling of form with the limited ability to
model ®ts and assemblies.
3 Future systems need to help the designer visualize
Information managed by an ideal mechanical engineering function before geometry is fully de®ned. Computer sys-
design support system tems are allowing better representation of function, e.g.,
Mechanical engineers manage a broad range of informa- kinematic, dynamic, ¯uid ¯ow, and virtual reality systems.
tion. In this section, the various types of information will With the continued development of computer support
be itemized, beginning with the most basic and progress- tools, the ability to work from function to form will
ing to the most demanding. continue to evolve.
CAD systems to date have been part driven. Parts are
3.1 developed and then ®tted together to make an assembly.
Form, fit, and function The contributions of the layout drawing have not been well
The ideal engineering design support system should: supported. Parametric systems have begun to move to a
more natural ¯ow, but parametric modeling requires the
1. Allow designers to work from desired function to the designer to plan ahead of time the geometric constraint
other types of information. relationships that de®ne the part. Many parametric sys-
2. Allow designers to ¯exibly work on the architecture, tems refer to the ordering of the constraints as the design
shape, ®t, and function of parts and assemblies. intent. This methodology, while moving toward the ideal,
does not well support the designer as the planning needed
The mechanical design community has traditionally adds burden, and the ordering may not be known initially
thought in terms of form, ®t, and function. Figure 2 shows and may change during the development. Further, ``design
the interplay among these basic types of information that intent'' as used in parametric systems is too limiting (see
describe the product being designed. Generally, the reason discussion of design intent below).
for the object being designed is to ful®ll some desired
functions. The form of the parts and assemblies, and the ®t Opportunity. Extend CAD systems to allow the designer to
between them, depend on the desired function of the develop the architecture of parts and assemblies to ful®ll
product. Thus, the ideal system should allow the designer needed function. They must allow the designer to work
to work from function to form and ®t. from the architecture to the shape and ®t of the compo-
The term ``form'' actually implies both the architecture nents themselves. This will require working with abstrac-
and the shape of parts and assemblies (Fig. 3). The term tions of parts and assemblies as well as building the
``architecture'' has come to mean the skeletal structure that
maps the function to the form. Architecture is the ``stick
®gure'' that can be easily manipulated and changed before
the shape is re®ned. Shape implies the geometry that adds

Fig. 3. The basic types of mechanical design information with form

Fig. 2. The basic types of mechanical design information re®ned
 Res Eng Design 13 (2002)

58 Fig. 4. The basic types of mechanical design information with

manufacturing, assembly, and materials added
Fig. 5. The basic types of design information plus cost

geometry of objects from their architecture and interfaces a component and establishing a cost for it. In many
with other objects. companies, the engineer draws a component and sends it
to another group for cost estimation. The time lag in this
3.2 process does not match what is needed for ef®cient
Material and manufacturing design.
The ideal engineering design support system should:
3. Integrate the manufacturing and assembly practices and Where we are today. Cost estimation has not been well
common material usage of the company or its vendors. supported by any type of system. Some DFA (design for
assembly) systems can estimate for cost, but these are not
One of the cornerstones of concurrent engineering is the integrated with part representation in a CAD system.
integration of the development of the product and the The cost of a component is based on: the major dimen-
processes that support the product. Key among these sions of the component, the architecture of the component,
processes are those used to manufacture the parts and the tolerances and surface ®nish needed, the number to be
assemble them. These activities also depend on the selec- made, the material used, the machines used in the manu-
2
tion or development of the best materials for the product. facturing process, and labor and machine rates. The ®rst
Thus, as shown in Fig. 4, the basic form (architecture and three items can be directly developed from the geometry
shape), ®t, and function need to be tied to materials, and other notation commonly put on a drawing. The
manufacturing, and assembly. number to be made can be input by the designer. Since
every organization has a palette of materials and manu-
Where we are today. Currently, there are systems that aid facturing processes that are used for most products, these
in the development of injection molds and sheet metal should be integrated with the geometry through a database.
parts. However, for most manufacturing and assembly Then, the material properties, material costs, machine
methods, only text notes have supported this nongeo- costs, and labor rates for the organization could be linked
metric information. with the geometry. With this information a cost estimate
within 10% of the actual cost can be developed and updated
Opportunity. Extend CAD systems to provide the designer as changes are made to the geometry or another variable.
with information about anticipated material and manu-
facturing methods. This needs to be personalized as each Opportunity. CAD systems need to generate a running
company and vendor has certain materials and manufac- update of costs as parts and assemblies are changed ± in
turing and assembly methods that are standard and well real time.
known. Knowledge about these should be easily available
to the designer to aid in the development of parts and 3.4
assemblies. Requirements
The ideal engineering design support system should:
3.3 5. Support the relationship between the requirements
Cost and the development of the product.
The ideal engineering design support system should:
4. Support the engineer so she or he is aware of the effect The requirements (here the term is used synonymously
of each feature change on cost as it is generated. with constraints, speci®cations, or goals) for a part or
assembly are a type of information that does not describe
The cost to make the object being designed is not a part
of its description, yet it is a major factor in all design 2
Basic cost estimation for designers is discussed in The Mechanical
considerations. It is shown in Fig. 5 as closely tied to the Design Process [32]. Simple rule-based systems to estimate the cost of
material used and the manufacturing method and through plastic injection molded, machined, and forged parts have been de-
veloped and checked versus actual cost by the author. These systems
these indirectly to the function and form. Often there is a have shown that estimating cost in sucient detail to guide the designer
disconnection during the design process between drawing is readily possible.
D.G. Ullman: Toward the ideal mechanical engineering design support system

59

Fig. 6. Requirements on the basic types of design information Fig. 7. Issues and plans for design information development

what is being designed, but the limitations and targets on

it. As such, it is critical information. As shown in Fig. 6, the mid 1980s. The tie between product and process is a
there are requirements on all the other types of infor- major part of concurrent engineering. In the late 1990s,
mation previously discussed. Traditionally, engineers this concern became prominent with the development of
have done a poor job at developing requirements for interest in integrated product and process development
products. (IPPD), the successor to concurrent engineering.
Traditionally, the product design community addresses
Where we are today. One of the best practices currently the design process in terms of the tasks to be completed in
used to develop requirements in industry is quality func- developing a new product. These tasks are focused on
tion deployment (QFD) [7,32]. Many companies use the speci®c design issues that can be planned for in the de-
results of this method to directly feed requirements to the velopment of the product. However, many issues arise
development of components and assemblies. Admittedly, during the design of a product that can not be planned for.
many of the requirements developed with the QFD are for This is especially true during the development of new
function; however, there are always many constraints on products or during the use of new technologies. Figure 7
both function and geometry that drive the development of shows that issues and plans address all types of require-
parts and assemblies. To date, this is not well integrated ments and product information.
with CAD systems. Issues or tasks in product design require the designer
Stauffer [26] showed that as the design process moves to develop new information. One of the ®rst experiments
from conceptual through layout to detail design, the aimed at understanding human information processing
source of constraints moves from those imposed from during design tasks [27] showed that over two-thirds of
outside the control of the designer to those based on the strategies used by the design engineers during the
previous design decisions. This implies that not only development of new products were searches through
should requirements like those developed using QFD-type design space. Searches imply that there is a range of
methods be integrated, but the reasoning behind earlier potential solutions to every issue and that the designer
decisions also needs to be supported. This will be further must look at several of these alternative solutions to
discussed in the section on design intent (Sect. 3.6). develop one that is satisfactory. Search strategies are well
studied by the arti®cial intelligence community. Three
Opportunity. CAD systems need to integrate requirements types of strategies de®ned by computer scientists and
and constraints into the development of parts and as- identi®ed in the cognitive study were ``generate and test'',
semblies. ``generate and improve'', and ``means ends analysis''. In
each search type, the designer develops and re®nes the
3.5 alternatives and compares them to the requirements until
Issues and plans some satisfactory choice has been made in the time
The ideal engineering design support system should: available. Based on these ®ndings, in order to support
designers, systems must not only track the completion of
6. Support the development, following, and updating
planned work, but must also support the development
of plans.
and management of multiple alternatives for all issues
7. Support the management of issues not planned for. addressed.

Whereas all the types of information described so far Where we are today. Project planning and change man-
represent the artifacts being designed and the require- agement has always been a large part of engineering
ments on them, the following types of information repre- management. Product data management (PDM) systems
sent the process through which the artifacts are developed. have made large strides toward integrating the actual de-
The importance of the process has been a concern in in- sign work with what was planned. These systems are still
dustry since the early 1980s and an area of research since maturing.
 Res Eng Design 13 (2002)

60

Fig. 8. Design intent

Opportunity. Computer support tools need to continue to effect relationships among product data. In an unpub-
evolve to assist the engineer in developing the product and lished document, a STEP IV researcher states: ``Generally,
the process in an integrated fashion. the term intent means the purpose or plan for performing
activities. During product design, these activities trans-
3.6 form a set of requirements to the ®nal speci®cations for
Intent production. In a basic sense, the intent is the blueprint for
The ideal engineering design support system should the evolution of the requirements into the production
manage all the previously de®ned types of information in a speci®cations. This blueprint not only has information
database plus: about the development of the geometry, but also on the
8. Support information about problems or issues addressed evolution of the product function and behavior, the
(e.g., business issues, planning issues, and artifact design rationale underlying design decisions and the in¯uence
issues). of business activities.''
In the CAD community, the term intent is used to de-
9. Support information about arguments for or against scribe the ordering of geometric constraint equations in a
alternatives (e.g., qualitative discussion, quantitative parametric system. This ordering de®nes the geometric
analysis, rules, and standards) based on requirements. dependency needed by the system in order to make
10. Support information about the decisions reached. changes and is not necessarily the cognitive ordering that
was followed by the designer in the development or
A number of authors have explored the concept of re- re®nement of the part or assembly.
cording a ``design history''. Nearly 15 years ago, Mostow Finally, in some business literature, the term corporate
stated that there was a growing consensus in the arti®cial memory is used to emphasize the feeling that the
intelligence community that, ``an idealized design history information managed is beyond that associated with the
is a useful abstraction of the design process'' [19]. In the traditional artifact as it includes business information
late 1980s, this author and his colleagues built an object- as well. In the results of the ®rst CERC Workshop on
oriented database that organized information about the Enabling Technologies [21], the discussion on
design of a simple mechanical system [5,6,30]. This dat- corporate memory was in terms of design histories and
abase could be queried about the evolution of constraints rationales.
and the effect of decisions on the artifacts being developed. Supporting full design intent information may even be
Since Mostow, the arti®cial intelligence community has more complex than storing what has been generated
been active in developing ``design rationale'' systems. A during design. Gruber [8] claims that it is not suf®cient
workshop held in 1992 [16] de®ned the term rationale as just to capture, store, and retrieve the same information.
``an explanation that answers a question about why an He observes: ``rationales (intents) are constructed and
artifact is designed as it is.'' Baxter [3], in his thesis, re®nes inferred from stored information rather than as complete
the de®nition: ``Design rationale: an information structure answers.'' In other words, design intent systems may have
that justi®es how the implementation (consequences of the to answer questions that require information different
design selections) satis®es its speci®cation.'' This de®ni- than that captured. The questions that arise during query
tion emphasizes the structure of the design information may not be answerable with only the information of the
and tracking the relation of decisions back to the speci®- original design. This implies that the data must be struc-
cations. tured during capture or storage so that answers can be
Another community, which is organized around devel- developed to needed questions.
opment of the STEP IV standard, uses the term ``design Design intent systems must record and manage infor-
intent''. Their use of design intent refers to the cause and mation that shows why and how a decision was made
D.G. Ullman: Toward the ideal mechanical engineering design support system

about each issue addressed. As shown in Fig. 8, a design 12. Add no cognitive burden while supporting information
intent system needs to support all the types of information development.
previously developed and store this information in an
easily indexed database. Design is the evolution of information punctuated by de-
cisions. The types of information that are developed dur-
Where we are today. To capture, store, and allow query of ing the design process represent both the product being
the design information is a challenging research area [31]. designed, the process by which it is being designed, and
To a limited degree, PDM systems are beginning to man- other processes in the life of the product such as manu-
age some of the needed information. However, these sys- facture, distribution, and retirement. This information
tems tend to be oriented toward information that is well does not spring into being fully formed but evolves
re®ned and not evolutionary information. Further, these through a series of problem-solving episodes. Based on
61
systems do not have a formal mechanism for managing cognitive studies, the average problem-solving episode is
information about argumentation leading to decisions. about one minute in duration [28]. In a majority of these
Parametric and variational systems allow for design re- episodes, a micro-problem is addressed whose goal is to
use. Thus, it is easy to ®nd the answer to queries about the develop or re®ne information [27]. In each of these micro-
effect of form changes and sensitivities. In this manner, problems, a number of alternatives are considered and
these systems have captured some of the intent behind the judged relative to some criteria. The resulting decision can
information modeled. One limitation of these systems is be one of many options: adopt a single alternative, develop
that they can only be used with geometric decisions and new criteria, re®ne the evaluation, etc.
decisions about behavior that can be geometrically mod- Support for information development is to act as an
eled. Additionally, these systems do not model the actual extension of the short-term memory. To accomplish this,
decision structure. They only record the order initially the external memory must match the speed of the STM.
anticipated to give the system necessary geometric rea- Engineers are notorious for not being able to think without
soning. If the value of a parameter (i.e., the length of a making ``back-of-the-envelope'' sketches of rough ideas.
part) is queried, parametric systems will give information Sometimes these informal sketches serve to communicate
about this length's dependency on other dimensions of the a concept to a colleague, but more often they just help the
part. However, it does not give the rationale for the rela- idea take shape on paper by extending the STM. Dan
tions or the arguments for the current value. Herbert in Study Drawings in Architectural Design:
A number of CAD companies have begun to offer design Applications for CAD Systems [9] considers the use of
notebooks that allow the designer to keep notes about the sketches (study drawings to architects) in the solution of
evolving products. These notebooks are the ®rst step in architectural design problems. He de®nes study drawings
supporting needed activities and information manage- as ``informal, private drawings that architectural designers
ment. However, it is believed that additional structure and use as a medium for graphic thinking in the exploratory
indexing will be necessary to achieve useful design ratio- stages of their work.'' Architects often make these study
nale support systems. drawings in the borders of or adjacent to their formal
drawings. In Herbert's theory, sketches are used because
Opportunity. There is great potential in this area for im- they provide an extended memory for the visual images in
proving the design process and the reuse of information. the mind of the designer. Since sketches can be made more
CAD systems have begun to capture and manage the rapidly than formal drawings, they allow for more facile
needed information. manipulation of ideas. Furthermore, sketches allow the
information to be represented in various forms such as
4 differing views or levels of abstraction. Thus, he calls
Ideal mechanical engineering design support sketches graphic metaphors for both the real object and
system activities the formally drafted object under development. In fact,
There are seven activities that the external environment Herbert claims that sketches are a principal medium of
provides to the designer regardless of the information external thinking. Thus, the external media must match
managed and media used. These activities serve as the speed of the STM. It also should support the manip-
dimensions for measuring the external environment's ulation of the ideas.
ability to aid the designer. The activity discussion is based Since humans are already cognitively limited by a STM
on that presented in Issues Critical to the Development that can only manage seven chunks of information, the
of Design History, Design Rationale and Design Intent media of the external memory must provide aid with
Systems [31]. minimal cognitive baggage. Each additional chunk
required by the external media is one less for problem
4.1 solving. For example, if it takes part of STM to draw a
Support information development sketch for a new idea using a CAD system, then the idea
The ideal engineering design support system should sup- represented will, by necessity, be less complicated [25].
port the manipulation of the different types of information
and: Where we are now. Springer et al. [25] compared an early
11. Match the speed of the short-term memory during version of AutoCAD (2.6) to work on a drafting board.
information development. The results showed that CAD took nearly twice as long to
produce a comparable design because ``a bottleneck in
 Res Eng Design 13 (2002)

using the CAD-system forces the subjects to concentrate Opportunity. A goal of CAD vendors should be to develop
on the use of the CAD dialog and to neglect the design systems that work at the rate of cognition. Such systems
task.'' This result held regardless of increased CAD ex- would have virtually no menus. A research project with
perience. Although this research is dated, the result is this goal was undertaken in 1989 [10]. The resulting sys-
not. During the use of CAD systems, icon and menu tem could infer complex geometry solids from simple
selecting add unneeded steps to creating an image. A sketching motions. Although this may not be viable for a
current best-selling parametric system has menus up to commercial system, ®ve layers of menus are not viable for
®ve levels deep that are needed to do many operations. a system that matches human abilities.
These steps add an extreme cognitive burden to both the
novice and expert user. 4.2
62
One part of the cognitive research discussed in the in- Capture, archive, and query information
troduction of this paper [29] focused on the marks on The ideal engineering design support system should:
paper designers make during the design process. In the 13. Capture all types of information with a single entry.
protocol sections studied, the average length of time to
make a mark on paper was 7.3 s with a standard deviation 14. Archive all the types of information so that design intent
of 7.8 s. The 363 marks-on-paper studied were divided can be readily recovered.
into ``draw'' marks and ``support'' marks. These are fur- 15. Support designer query about the design intent for all
ther re®ned into ``sketch'' and ``draft'' marks and ``text'', types of information.
``dimension'', and ``calculate'' marks respectively. Thus,
there are ®ve types of marks-on-paper: The three activities necessary for a design history or de-
sign intent system are the capture, archiving, and query of
· Sketch: Drawings of features made freehand. Accounts design information. Thus, these three are discussed to-
for 48% of marks-on-paper. Sketching on paper is not gether. Design information is captured in the external
the same as sketching on the computer using a CAD environment. This information may be discarded as with
system. traditional paper layout drawings, white board drawings,
· Draft: Drawings made with mechanical devices. 24% and many notes, or it may become part of the product
· Text: Letters, words, or numbers that are not part of a archive. Typically, only information about the geometry of
dimension on a drawing and not part of a calculation. 9% the ®nal parts and assemblies are archived. Many engi-
· Dimension: Dimensions or dimension lines on a draw- neers also capture information in design notebooks. This
ing (either a sketch or a draft). 14% information is often only readable by the engineer who
· Calculate: Equations and answers to calculations. wrote it and is not indexed in any useful way. Captured
Combines constraints or design proposals to derive new information forms the basis for a design intent system.
information. 5% The external environment also serves to store informa-
tion about the product or the process. Typical types of
There was some debate as to how to differentiate between information archived in the past are, for example, part and
sketch and draft marks. There are two measures to con- assembly drawings, plans, meeting notes, bills of materials,
sider: (a) the use of instruments and (b) whether or not the and simulation and test results. These types of information
drawing was to scale. Consistency with traditional college generally give a snapshot of the ®nal product with minimal
graphics texts suggests that the criteria should only be the information about the decisions that went into its devel-
use of instruments as de®ned above. All of the subjects had opment (the intent). Supporting the types of information
instruments at hand. However, some subjects chose to described above will require an enhancement of the cur-
make their scale drawing freehand. It would seem that they rent types of information stored and a re®nement of dat-
felt that it was easiest not to use the instruments. The abase technology.
differentiation between sketch and draft is made even Query is the activity of reviewing design documentation
clearer by considering when in the design process the in an attempt to learn about past activities related to a
drawing was made. When the subjects were trying to product or a process followed. Designers currently
conceptualize the design, 100% of the drawings were working on a project, reviewing their own past work, or
sketches. Later in the design process, during the layout reviewing the past work of others often seek information
and detail phases, this drops to 52% as some of the sub- about both the product's and the process' history. Often
jects used instruments to draw their re®ned design while this is described as seeking the design rationale, intent, or
others continued to sketch. corporate history [31]. Similar to designers, managers
Over 67% of the drawings were sketches. Many of these usually want to obtain information at a high level and
sketches could have been made using drafting equipment then have the ability to burrow down to deeper
or on a CAD system. But, with the average length of these information as desired. Further, they also want informa-
sketching actions less than 8 s, the use of instruments or tion about who is responsible for a given issue on a
CAD could have slowed the drawing action to the point project, who is working on a project, and the inter-
that the cognitive problem solving would be impaired. relationships between projects.
Thus, even the use of simple drafting instruments added Kuffner [14] performed a small set of experiments to try
suf®cient cognitive burden that they were not used during to determine the value of design information during re-
conceptual design. design. In this study, he gave engineers drawings for a
D.G. Ullman: Toward the ideal mechanical engineering design support system

simple product and asked them to make changes. He re- the organization. CAD companies have been aware of this
corded their work and analyzed it. One of the conclusions goal for many years and have been making progress
of this study was ``mechanical design engineers are inter- toward it.
ested in design information other than that which is
contained in standard design documentation.'' Query is Opportunity. CAD vendors need to continue to work on
often directly related to the role. Typical roles he found ®le transfer, geometric and other standards, and single
were state (versions), proposal, requirement, and example. entry of information.
Version information included changes that occurred ear-
lier in the development than those captured by the tradi- 4.4
tional engineering change management system. Guide work
The designers also sought answers to process questions. The ideal engineering design support system should:
63
These included questions about the issues faced, the al- 17. Guide the designer about what to do next.
ternatives developed to satisfy the issue, evaluations of the
alternatives, and decisions made. During the design process, decision makers repeatedly ask
three questions [33]:
Where we are now. Current CAD systems capture pri- · What is the best alternative?
marily form information. Some systems are adding note- · Do we know enough to make a decision yet?
book features that allow notation and linking to other · What do we need to do next to feel con®dent about our
information. These additions are in their infancy and are decision?
still dif®cult to query.
This last question is a request for guidance. Should the
Opportunity. This area is seen as one with the greatest designers [34]:
potential for future design support. Engineers spend a · Develop more evaluation information?
great percentage of their time recreating prior work or · Further interpret and discuss evaluation information?
looking for prior information. The ability to capture, ar- · Generate new potential solutions?
chive, and query the full range of design information will · Re®ne criteria features and targets?
have extensive payback in terms of design ef®ciency and
design quality.
· Negotiate changes in criteria features and targets and
their importance?
· Decompose the issue into sub-issues?
4.3 · Reach conclusion and document result?
Communicate information
The ideal engineering design support system should: Currently, there is no methodology for guidance about
what to do next. Often designers do whatever is easiest, not
16. Communicate information in the format, level of
what will lead to a better decision. This is compounded in
abstraction, and level of detail needed.
team situations. The guidance addressed here is not the
same as planning. Planning can be done in advance
Communicating information among design team members
whereas this is directed at work in progress.
and managers is an essential part of engineering work¯ow
support. Communication must be across time and location. Where we are now. There has been very little work in this
Further, many types of information are used in the support area. Twelve Steps to Robust Decisions: Building Consensus
of engineering design, i.e., text, CAD ®les, analysis results in Product Development and Business [34] attempts to
and the ability to actively run analyses at remote locations, address these issues.
experimental results, and photographs.
Additionally, communication must support others who Opportunity. Every feature added to the design of an
are in need of the information developed by the engineers. assembly or part requires many decisions. Much time
Manufacturing, product support, sales, and other func- is wasted making poor decisions. The opportunities here
tions need the information from different viewpoints and are great.
at different levels of abstraction and detail.
5
Where we are now. -The Internet has greatly improved the Conclusions
ability to communicate graphical information among en- Mechanical design support systems have done much to
gineers. There are still some limitations due to dif®culty change engineering design practice over the last 20 years.
converting data between systems. Various standards have Yet computer-based systems are weak in their ability to
helped but there is still need for more work on data con- support many of the activities and types of information
version. identi®ed in this paper. Further, there is little experimental
One measure of the ef®ciency of a system is to count evidence on the effect of CAD on the designer. It could be
how many times the same information needs to be entered argued that much in this paper is outside the expectations
on paper or in the computer. The ideal system will have a of what a CAD system is supposed to do and that PDM
single entry. Thus, the best computer support system systems, planning software, notebooks, material selectors,
should allow a piece of information to be entered once and etc. are designed to provide these missing functions. It
then be usable by all parties to support their function in could also be argued that evidence of CAD's ability to
 Res Eng Design 13 (2002)

support the design process is evidenced by its wide use. 14. Kuffner T, Ullman DG (1991) The information requests of
These arguments depend on expectations. If a CAD system mechanical design engineers. Des Stud 12(1):42±50
15. Liker JK, Fleischer M, Arnsdorf D (1992) Ful®lling the promises of
is designed to support drawing only, then that is all it will CAD. Sloan Management Review, Spring: 74±86
support. However, and this is a major point in this paper, 16. Lee J (1992) Summary report of AAAI `92 workshop on design
design is more than making drawings. It is a complex rationale. Concurrent Eng Res Rev 4:29±32
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