Designers have mixed feelings about methods. Christopher Alexander, the architect and design theoretician said “If you call it, ‘It’s a Good Idea To Do’, I like it very much; if you call it a ‘Method’, I like it but I’m beginning to get turned off; if you call it a ‘Methodology’, I just don`t want to talk about it” (Alexander, 1971). Engineering designers, who need to accomplish tasks by deadlines, are a bid more favourably predisposed to using methods.
So, what is a method, anyway? This looks like it should be an entirely straightforward question, and from the individual perspective of many engineers and designers it is an entirely straightforward question. The classical engineering design text book by Pahl and Beitz (2007) defines methods as “systematic procedure with the intention to reach a specific goal”. The notion of method causes a surprising amount of confusion among engineering designers in industry and academia; and this confusion adversely affects efforts to introduce new methods into industrial practice.
Method development is one of the raisons d’etre of engineering design research and method uptake by industry is perceived as an important success criterion. Learning methods for specific tasks is an important part of design education. However when we look at industry, we find that a lot of engineers and designers work methodically, but whether they follow a specific method is an other matter. They use methods up a point and than often give up. Great, if the method has given them what they needed, but often they just get stuck.
In the Modelling and Managing Engineering Processes Special Interest Group of of the Design Society, we are working as an international group on modelling design processes and methods to support them. We bring experts from industry and academia together to work on challenging concepts. In a recent workshop with industry, it became very clear, that companies use news methods, if they have a crisis and the new methods help in resolving it. Otherwise they only use methods that are very well established and worked out in a lot of detail and explained very well.
A good idea is not enough. Designers need to understand how to represent the results the results the method generates, have a procedure they can follow in applying the method and understand the context in which the method is intended to the used. Only if these are clear and work well together, the method can be picked up by others. Below is an overview of the core concepts involved in modelling design processes. More details can be found here in a recent conference paper.
| Term | Explanation |
| Core idea | The basic principle, technique or theory that the method employs. |
| Representation | An object or other artefact that shows and stands for a target system, i.e. intermediate results and deliverable created by using the method. |
| Procedure | A description of the actions required to apply a method, for enabling the user of the method to do something more easily or with a sufficient guarantee of correctness, focusing on the sequence of actions and their completeness. |
| Intended use | A description of scope of a method, the coverage within, scope and expected benefit from using the method, informing the user about suitability of the method for a particular design task in a specific context. |
References
Alexander, C. (1971). The state of art in design methodology. Design Method Group Newsletter, pp. 3–7. Berkeley.
Pahl, G., Beitz, W., Feldhusen, J., & Grote, K. H. (2007). Engineering Design – A Systematic Approach (3rd ed.).Berlin: Springer-Verlag.
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