The status of design

theory research in the

United States
David G Ullman
Department of Mechanical Engineering, Oregon State University, Corvallis, Oregon, 97331, USA

This paper contains a discussion of United States design theory research. It begins with a definition of a
design theory and a brief history of design theory research. This is developed into the factors that affect
the research direction and results. The paper concludes with a listing of the types of research currently
being persued.

Keywords: design theory research, USA

INTRODUCTION The act of designing is certainly a natural phenomenon so

This paper gives a brief picture of the status of design
theory research in the United States. As a basis for this
discussion, an effort will be made in the next section to
define what is meant by the term 'design theory'. This
will be followed by a brief history of design theory
research in the United States with emphasis on the
factors that affect its direction. In the fourth section
current research areas will be identified. Finally, in the
fifth section expected future directions for research will
be identified. When reading this paper it should be
remembered that it represents one researcher's views and
that this researcher, although interested in all areas of
design, is primarily a mechanical engineer. Additionally,
this paper will focus on the influences and direction of
design theory research rather than try to relate a specific
theory. This is because there is not yet (in the USA) a
specific theory to describe. It is still evolving.
W H A T IS A ' D E S I G N THEORY'?
Theories are developed to explain natural phenomena.
it seems reasonable that developing theories about the
design process is a worthy goal. However, as will be
shown, few US researchers are driven primarily by this
goal. Before supporting this statement, the definition of a
theory will be refined.
A theory has three basic components; a set of variables
that measure the phenomena, a cluster a models relating
the variables to explain the phenomena and hypotheses
for the application of the models to the real world. 1 A
standard mechanics textbook is built on variables (e.g. F,
m, a), contains models based on Newton's laws of motion
and has guidance (hypotheses) on how to apply these to
real problems. We rely on this material to explain basic
mechanics to our students.
Theories about design can have one of three different
foci. First, they can be formulated to explain the de-
signed object itself, i.e. how the object comes into being
and evolves into a final, manufactured product. Second,
theories can be formulated to explain how the designer(s)
transforms an ill-defined problem into a fully described
product. Finally, theories can be developed that attempt
to explain the process of design, the interaction of the
artifact and the people and/or computers in the design

204 0142-694X/91/04204-05 © 1991 Butterworth-Heinemann Ltd DESIGN STUDIES

environment. Theories developed about these three foci
are not independent.
Dixon 2 has argued that design theories can be pre-
scriptive (what should be done), cognitive (what is done)
or computational (how to do it). This breakdown is also
useful.
Another aspect of a theory that will help in under-
standing the state of research in the United States is along
what might be called the pragmatic dimension. At one
end of this dimension is the philosophical study of design
that attempts to give an idealized rationality to it. At the
other is the sociological view that seeks to explain the
interaction of social and technological issues, i.e. what
actually occurs. Any effort to explain the design itself,
the designer or the design process can rely on an ideal
model, a social model or anywhere in between.
A final consideration is a theory's breadth of applica-
tion. This is really part of the hypotheses for how to
apply the model, but it is treated as a separate item as it is
of importance in understanding design theory. In de-
veloping theory about design, research can range from a
single class of artifacts in a limited domain (e.g. a theory
of gear design) or phase of the design process (e.g. a
theory of embodiment), to a general theory that applies
to the design of anything regardless of domain or phase.
Based on the three descriptors of a design theory, its foci,
pragmatism and breadth, the following section gives
some history of design theory research in the United
States.
A BRIEF HISTORY OF DESIGN THEORY IN
THE U N I T E D STATES
This section will attempt to piece together a history of the
interest in and influences on design theory studies in the
United States. The discussion will begin generally and
then focus on the leadership of the National Science
Foundation, consumer product industries and the De-
partment of Defense on the directions of design theory
research. It must be borne in mind that the research areas
pursued are greatly influenced by these three funding
sources. The section ends with another indicator of the
interest in the study of design theory - professional
society activity.
In the USA, the term 'design theory' was virtually
unheard of prior to the early 1980s. Around 1980 texts
covering the structured design of computer codes 3 and
the systematic design of VLSI systems4 were published.
These texts focused on specific domains and gave an
idealized process for the development of the products
within the domains. They and other texts in the same
disciplines have had considerable influence. The struc-
tured techniques have spawned industries that manufac-
ture computer tools to support these models.
During the same period there were a number of books
published that presented theories for mechanical design.
In the United States, Planning and creating successful
engineering designs: managing the design process by Love 5
gave a view of the mechanical design process that formed
Vol 12 No 4 October 1991
a view between practitioner and manager. This book
however, was never very widely disseminated. Books by
Hubka 6 and by Pahl and Beitz7 were also published at this
period. Hubka's book is oriented toward a philosophical
theory of the design process and has not been widely
studied in the US. The text by Pahl and Beitz presents a
model of the design process that is a compendium of
techniques and design axioms. This text was not widely
read in the US until late in the decade when it became a
reference for design methodologists. It has also found
some use as a text in graduate courses.
In September 1985 the National Science Foundation
(NSF) sponsored a workshop for representatives from
the disciplines of chemical, civil, electrical, industrial
and mechanical engineering, and computer science. The
goal of this workshop was to establish goals and priorities
for NSF funding of research in design theory and
methodology (Rabins et al.S). This workshop identified
five research areas as making up the discipline of design
theory and methodology
• conceptual design and innovation
• quantitative and systematic methods
• intelligent and knowledge-based systems
• information integration and management
• human interface issues in design
They further identified a series of criteria on which to
base the evaluation of proposed research. First on this list
was
Contribution to theory: Will research in this area add to the
fundamental body of knowledge and provided new theore-
tical and generic insight into the design process?
The second and third criteria were oriented toward
relevance to practice and entrepreneurial potential. Thus
the participants in the workshop saw the development of
underlying, domain independent, theories as a primary
research direction for the NSF. Based on the results of
this workshop the NSF Design Theory and Methodology
program office began operation in 1985. Its goals were to
fund research in (1) scientific theories of design, (2)
foundations for design environments, and (3) models of
the design process.
In February 1987 the program had its first meeting
(Waldron9). The attendees ranged from design philo-
sophers (who were truly looking for an ideal model of
design), to the pragmatists looking for problems on
which to apply their computer algorithms. The partici-
pants also ranged across all disciplines from the fine
artists, architects and philosophers, to computer scien-
tists and mechanical engineers. The meeting was not very
successful as there was no agreed definition of 'design'
and little unity on the approach to studying it. In many
ways it was like a tower of Babel with few speaking the
same language.
Since that first meeting the NSF program has steadily
drifted from its original goals to the point where its
emphasis is now primarily focused on the design of
mechanical objects with a strong emphasis on design for
manufacturing. Thus, the breadth of research funded has
205
narrowed to focus on mechanical objects and it has
become very utilitarian and unphilosophical.
Although NSF is a major guiding influence on re-
search in the United States, other equally strong influ-
ences are the consumer product industry and the defense
industry. Leadership in the consumer products industry
has come from companies in highly competitive fields
such as office equipment, automobiles and farm equip-
ment. This leadership has taken three paths - the
adoption of techniques from Japan and Europe, the
improvement of information management and the fund-
ing of research on design issues. Each of these paths will
be discussed.
In the late 1970s the United States began losing
consumer product and automobile markets to the
Japanese and Europeans. For example, in 1980 the
Japanese could sell a photocopier for the same price as
Xerox could manufacture one. One Xerox study to find
out why they were no longer competitive focused on the
cost of individual parts. By comparing plastic parts from
their machines to parts that performed similar functions
in Japanese and European machines, they found that the
Japanese could produce a part for 50% less than Amer-
ican or European firms. They attributed the cost differ-
ence to three factors: materials cost 10% less; wages,
tooling and processing costs were 15% less and; the
remaining 25% (50% of the difference) was attributable
to how the parts were designed. 1°
Based on these results companies like Ford and Xerox
adopted methods from the Japanese such as quality
function deployment and Taguchi's robust design techni-
ques.
The second emphasis in the consumer product indus-
try is a strong effort on product information manage-
ment. These efforts have focused mainly on compute-
rized data bases. Although not directed at the develop-
ment of a design theory, they aid in the evolution of data
representations which embody the variables on which
theories are based.
The third emphasis has been in funding research. The
proportion of research funded by consumer product
corporations is unknown, but is thought to be compara-
ble to that funded by the NSF. Research funded by these
industries is primarily focused on understanding the
design of objects with little effort on the process or the
designer. Additionally, a majority of this research is on a
specific product or narrow class of products.
The US Department of Defense (DOD) has also had a
strong influence on the direction of design theory re-
search. Their efforts are built around the concept of
concurrent design. In a report published by the Institute
for Defense Analysis (IDA), an advisory group to the
DOD, concurrent design is defined as
Concurrent engineering is a systematic approach to the
integrated, concurrent design of products and their related
processes, including manufacture and support. This
approach is intended to cause the developers, from the
outset, to consider all elements of the product life cycle from
conception through disposal, including quality, cost, sche-
dule and user requirements, n
206
As can be appreciated from this definition the DOD
effort is very broad and very pragmatic.
Beyond the influence of the NSF, the consumer
products industry and the DOD, the professional
societies reflect the interest in design theory develop-
ment. In 1987 the American Society of Mechanical
Engineering (ASME) Design Theory and Methodology
Committee was formed in the Society's Design Division.
Although other professional societies have groups in-
terested in design theory, only this committee has actual-
ly sponsored conferences on the subject. 12"~3 The first
conference contained 13 papers and the second 45. Both
conferences were held in parallel with other Design
Division conferences. The design theory and methodol-
ogy sessions drew 50 to 100 participants to each session, a
very strong showing. A third meeting is scheduled for
September 1991 in Miami, and will be restricted to 50
papers in an effort to keep the quality high.
TECHNICAL AREAS OF DESIGN THEORY
STUDIES
There are very few researchers in the US who are trying
to find a basic, philosophical, underlying science of
design. This search for an idealized model has been
overshadowed by the development of domain and phase
dependent models as a result of the interests of the
financial sponsors.
One other factor that has greatly influenced the de-
velopment of design theories in the United States is the
strength of the computer industry. Virtually every en-
gineer in the United States has access to a computer and
most have at least a PC on their desk. Thus there is a
great emphasis on the use of computers in the design
process.When mechanical Computer Aided Design
(CAD) systems were becoming popular in the late 1970s,
they were marketed as actual aids to the design process.
By the mid 1980s it was realized that they were really best
suited for drafting and were of little help for design. Both
the CAD industry and the user community realized that
the primary users of the systems were draftspersons and
that very few of them were used by engineers. This
realization encouraged research on improving user inter-
faces, developing tools to support earlier stages of the
design process and achieving more sophisticated data
representations.
Work on data representation has had a strong influ-
ence on the development of a basic vocabulary describing
the design objects and the design process. Through
developing ways of representing design information in
computers,-researchers have been forced to develop
underlying models of the design process. Developing
these models and their subsequent testing, has lead
researchers to refine the models and push toward an
understanding of the basic building blocks of a design
theory.
The development of computer science techniques has
also influenced the direction of design theory research.
The computer science community developed techniques
DESIGN STUDIES
such as expert systems, object oriented programming,
hyper-medias, and cheap computing power. There is a
desire on the part of both the computer science and
engineering communities to put these techniques to work
to help support design activity. The use of these tools
forces the development of models and thus a theory of
design.
Actual research on design theory can be categorized in
a number of different ways. In a two-part paper titled 'A
review of research in mechanical engineering design 14'15
the discussion was organized into six research areas listed
below. The number of US research projects mentioned
for each area is shown in brackets
• descriptive models of the design process (10)
• prescriptive models for design (3)
• computer-based models of design processes (58)
• languages, representations, and environments for de-
sign (31)
• analysis to support design decisions (22)
• design for manufacturing and other life cycle issues
such as reliability, service ability, etc. (35)
Clearly the bulk of the research is focused on computa-
tional modelling and the underlying vocabulary needed
to support these models. The influence of consumer
product and defence industries is also shown.
FUTURE DIRECTIONS
In a report 16 released in February 1991 (NRC 90), the
Committee on Engineering Design Theory and Method-
ology of the National Research Council (NRC) recom-
mended that research in the United States follow a ten
point, national research agenda, outlined below
(A) Developing scientific foundations for design models
and methods
• computer representations for in-progress designs
• generating, organizing and generalizing design
knowledge
• synthesis: parametric, configuration, and concep-
tual design
• tolerance synthesis
(B) Creating and improving design support tools
• designer-oriented computational prototyping,
analysis and simulation tools
• rapid physical prototyping
• design for 'X'
(C) Relating design to the business enterprise
• quality/cost models
• organization and communication models
• innovation
Since reports from the NRC are very influential, it is
expected that future research will be focused in these
areas. The development of a design theory is not explicit-
ly listed as one of the areas. Rather, models will be
developed in each of these areas that contribute to an
evolving theory.
Vol 12 No 4 October 1991
CONCLUSIONS
This paper has focused on two topics; the factors that are
influencing the development of a design theory in the
United States, and the directions that design theory
research is taking. From this discussion the following
conclusions can be drawn
• design theory research is in the pre-theory stage.
There is still a search for the basic vocabulary and
building blocks of a theory
• the theories developed in Europe are not well known
nor broadly studied in the USA
• there is more a focus on computer based tool develop-
ment than on theory development. There is a general
feeling that through understanding and developing
models of the parts, the whole may be understood
• there is no clear common design research community.
Rather it is still discipline and viewpoint fragmented
• there is weak leadership on design theory research
from the National Science Foundation. There is some
from the DOD built around the concept of concurrent
design, however concurrent design does not have
theory development as its goal
• there is virtually no research from the philosophical
view point. This is not to say that researchers do not
step back from their work periodically and try to
philosophize about how it fits into an overall theory of
design
These conclusions do not imply that a design theory is
not evolving in the United States. It is on an ad-hoc basis
with no clear focus or goal. As models are developed to
solve the pieces of the design puzzle, a theory will evolve.
This is still at least seven years away. If only we could use
a sound design methodology to approach the problem of
designing a t h e o r y . . .
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208 DESIGN STUDIES