Beyond Engineering Bias: designing a tool to liberate conceptual design
Beyond Engineering Bias:
designing a tool to liberate conceptual design
Computing Department & Design Discipline
The Open University, Milton Keynes, UK
A. Blandford & H. Thimbleby (eds)
HCI'96 Industry Day and Adjunct Proceedings
School of Computing Science, Middlesex University, 1996, pp 173-180.
Open University Computing Department Research Report 96/04
Abstract. The FACADE project is developing a prototype support system for the conceptual design of mechatronic systems, which is designed both to mitigate and exploit the inevitable biasing effects of design tools on design processes. It includes a suite of design environments supporting different visual representations, to help designers escape the restrictions of any one formalism. As far as possible the system avoids restricting the order in which designers perform tasks, and it allows them to mix concepts at different abstraction levels, in order to allow them to adopt structured methodologies without being tied to them, and to design by modifying previous versions. The system includes a design environment designed to help and encourage engineers to think about mechatronic systems as networks of flows of matter, energy and information.
Keywords: HCI, design, CAD, mechatronics.
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Martin Stacey
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Marian Petre, Helen Sharp
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