Decision-Making in Engineering Design

We use our brains when we create plans and designs. The resulting plans and designs take physical form, however, what we thought about, the alternatives we tried, and the constraints we recognized while we were making these plans and designs are usually not written anywhere. Therefore, those who only get to see the results, e.g. the final text and drawings, do not learn what led the designer to reach such conclusions and as a consequence never understand the real design.

Decision-making in Engineering Design is the first monograph to provide a much-needed insight into the ways in which our minds behave when we make decisions, focusing particularly on decisions made about design.

Written by members of 'The Practice of Machine Design Research Group' and consisting of four parts, Decision-making in Engineering Design uses case studies to illustrate the decisions made by engineers in a variety of situations. A variety of diagrams are also used to express the decision processes that take place in the mind. The final part of the book focuses on a single case study which demonstrates the importance of understanding the mind processes involved in decision making.

This description of decision processes will provide the means for the development of new manufacturing systems and production activities in the future because it helps us gain a real understanding of the how the mind processes we go through when making decisions affect the decisions that we make.

The Decision Engineering series focuses on the foundations and applications of tools and techniques related to decision engineering, and identifies their relevance in 'engineering' decisions. The series provides an aid to practising professionals and applied researchers in the development of tools for informed operational and business decision making, within industry, by utilising distributedorganisational knowledge.

Auteur

Dr. Yotaro Hatamura is a Professor Emeritus at the University of Tokyo where he earned his Master's Degree in Mechanical Engineering in 1966, being invited back to teach there two years later. At present he is also a Professor at Kogakuin University. His fields of interest include nano-micro machining, force sensing, intelligent manufacturing and biomedical engineering. In 2002, he founded the Association for the Study of Failure, after noticing that his students were more interested in learning about people's mistakes than about their success stories. He has developed a method of analysing mistakes and failures and in order to show how one can achieve success by learning from failures.

Résumé
This book is a sequel to The Practice of Machine Design, and The Practice of Machine Design, Book 3 Learning from Failure. It deals with what happens inside the human mind during such activities as design and production, and how we reach decisions. Unlike other regular machine design textbooks or handbooks that describe how to accomplish good designs, the present volume explains what the designer thinks when making design decisions. A design starts with a vague concept and gradually takes shapes as it proceeds, and during this process the mind extracts elements and makes selections and decisions, the results expressed in sketches, drawings, or sentences. This book aims at exposing the reader to the processes of element extraction, selection, and decision-making through real-life examples. Such a book has never been published before. An explicit description of the processes of making decisions, on the contrary, has been greatly needed by designers, and the managers of design groups have been much aware of such a lack. The non-existence of this type of book in the past is due to the following three reasons: the benefit of describing the mind process of design was never made clear, the method of such clarification was unknown, and no one ever invested the vast energy for producing such a manifestation. Under these circumstances, we the members of the Practice of Machine Design Research Group boldly tackled the problem of expressing the decision processes in design and have documented our findings in this book.

Contenu

What are Decisions?.- Describing and Transferring the Decision Process.- Decisions in Design.- Sample Decisions in Design.- Real Decisions in Manufacturing.- Decisions about Individuals and Organizations.- Applying the Mind Activity for Manufacturing.