Jonathan R. A. Maier

Clemson University | CU · General Engineering

One of the principal advantages of affordance-based design is that Gibson's theory of affordances is a relational theory, akin to other relational approaches such as relational biology and relational computer science. The relationships between artifacts and their designers and users are of such primary importance that only a theory that is able to...

Affordances in design - Volume 29 Issue 3 - David C. Brown, Jonathan R.A. Maier

This paper describes the development and evolution of research themes in the Design Theory and Methodology (DTM) conference. Essays containing reflections on the history of DTM, supported by an analysis of session titles and papers winning the “best paper award”, describe the development of the research themes. A second set of essays describes the...

Despite the importance of design to engineering, industry, and the overall economy, design science remains a young and underdeveloped field. Current practitioners, researchers, and students of design are left to navigate a patchwork of methods addressing various phases of design without a unifying theoretical framework. In this book the theory of a...

Case study research in engineering design, while not as formalized and accepted as in the social sciences, is growing in popularity because of its ability to yield significant insights into how designers interact with design problems, processes, artifacts, and each other. A wealth of evidence for use in case studies exists in the form of undergradu...

Rather than developing methods to address problems as they occur, the effort in this paper is to formulate methods based on an explicit theory. Methods developed in this way have more scientific rigor because underlying propositions and assumptions are clearly articulated, thus the applicability and limitations of the methods are well defined. The...

The idea of affordance, borrowed from perceptual psychology, is applied to the domain of architecture. As to architectural theory, affordances can be used as a conceptual framework to understand the relationship between environments and occupants, especially with respect to form and function. Regarding architectural design, the concept of affordanc...

After reviewing current approaches to design theory, which are based on the transformative concept of function, we argue that this basis in function limits the scope of design problems and explanatory power of current design theories. As an alternative with greater potential for explanatory power and a framework for solving a wider array of design...

The Affordance Structure Matrix (ASM) is a concept exploration and attention directing tool to enable designers to take advantage of the special properties of affordances, such as form dependence and polarity of positive and negative affordances. However, in an ASM, as in other popular matrix based tools, the entities being mapped (in the case of a...

The trend toward lighter-weight vehicles in the private sector has been pushed by demands to improve fuel economy, improve dynamic performance, and reduce material and transportation costs. The same demands exist and are even more acute for military vehicles. The reduction of weight across a military vehicle platform can affect hundreds of thousand...

The theory of affordances has been adapted by the authors into a comprehensive high-level approach to design known as affordance based design. One of the features that distinguishes the affordance based approach from function based approaches is that affordances are form dependent. Designers can take advantage of this property during conceptual des...

Researchers at Clemson University, the US, have successfully designed a new design theory adopted from psychology which provides a new perspective to product development. This represents the first major rethinking of design theory since Newtonian mechanics, rationalized the design of mechanical components. The rethinking design is a conceptual basi...

The natural evolution of design leads to the creation of devices that are increasingly complex. From the invention of the wheel to the use of the wheel in the landing gear of a spacecraft, new technology often builds upon or further develops existing products. As devices become more complex, so does the process of designing them. In order to meet c...

The practice of requirements capture, modeling, and management is more advanced in some fields, such as software engineering, than is currently evidenced in the field of engineering design. This situation is due in part to the increased number of domains that engineering problems span. Software designers, for example, need not concern themselves wi...

The powerful concept of complexity can be applied to help us understand not only modern engineering systems, but also the design of those systems, and artifacts in general. In this chapter we attempt to establish a two-pronged theoretical framework for understanding the complexity of design. By design we mean the activity of designing artifacts in...

The realization that designing products in families can and does have significant technological and economic advantages over traditional single product design has motivated increasing interest in recent years in formal design tools and methodologies for product family design. However, currently there is no guidance for designers in the first key st...

The theory of affordances has been adapted by the authors into a high-level approach to design known as affordance based design. One of the features that distinguishes the affordance based approach from function based approaches is that affordances are form dependent whereas functions are form independent. While delaying consideration of form can h...

An affordance is what one system provides to another system. Originally introduced in the field of perceptual psychology by James Gibson, the concept of affordance has been proposed as a fundamental concept for engineering design by the authors in a recent series of papers. Recently the concept of affordance has begun to attract some attention with...

In this paper we discuss the conceptual basis for an integrated design environment that includes computationally intensive activities (simulation, analysis, solid modeling), as well as less computationally intensive activities (problem definition, requirements modeling, rationale capture), etc. Moreover, geometric information and semantic informati...

In the young field of engineering design theory, various approaches to design differ in their conceptual bases, methods, and scope. These core differences make comparing design theories difficult. One strategy to overcome these differences, long used in the social sciences to test and compare theories, is the case study. In this paper we adopt a pu...

In previous work, the authors have suggested that the concept of affordance, a term borrowed from the field of perceptual psychology, should be considered as more fundamental to design than other concepts such as function and behavior. This paper continues this avenue of research by presenting a generalized theory of affordances applicable to desig...

A major objective of engineering design research has been the establishment of design science. Toward this end, there is a need to establish the fundamental concepts that should underlie the basic theories comprising a science of design. The purpose of this paper is to compare two concepts that have been proposed as bases for design—the concept of...

The realization that designing products in families can and does have significant technological and economic advantages over traditional single product design has motivated increasing interest in recent years in formal design tools and methodologies for product family design. However, currently there is no guidance for designers in the first key st...

In an effort to ground the art and practice of design, especially engineering design, in a formal science, there is a need to identify the core, fundamental concepts on which such a science should be based. Popular engineering design guides have long emphasized the importance of function as a fundamental concept. In this paper we argue that another...

In this paper we focus on scale-based product families derived from scalable product platforms that can be exploited from both a functional and a manufacturing standpoint to increase the potential benefits of having a common platform. While many companies have been successful with scalable product platforms, few, if any, have instituted a systemati...

1. Abstract In an effort to improve customization without proliferating product variety and costs, many companies are being faced with the challenge of providing as much variety as possible for the market with as little variety as possible between products. Developing a family of products—a group of related products derived from a common product pl...

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Clemson University, 2005.