3.

Explore the Design Space

“If you rush too quickly toward system [design], you will miss out on creative ways to satisfy
user goals more effectively than you might by using the obvious first choice.”

Martin Fowler, 1997

A number of common pitfalls that design teams experience are the following:

- Consideration of only one alternative: The team begins detailed design work on the first
design idea that came to them. There is little or no discussion on whether this is the best
approach or even if there are other approaches.

- Driven by the most assertive team member: A member who is confident that he or she
has fully grasped the problem and has identified the solution sways the team at every
decision point. This is usually a case of overconfidence.

- Involvement of only one or two members: One or two members of the team are fully
engaged in the design process. They drive the decision making. If asked privately, the
other members will typically complain that their own ideas are not respected.

- Lack of commitment by others: The active and engaged members of the team complain
that the rest of the team is not participating: The others just ask to be told what to do.
The active members feel the burden of the project resting on them.

- Failure to look for useful concepts from other applications: The product the team
develops looks very much like past generations of the same product. Even though new
technologies (new materials, new energy sources, new design principles) are being
developed and applied elsewhere, the team seems unable to realize the relevance of these
technologies. The problem is that the team has not really looked outside the narrow
domain of an existing product and its direct competitors.

- Failure to consider entire categories of solutions: Again, the product looks like past
generations of the same product. The team never seriously considers any radically
different approaches. As the quote at the beginning of the chapter states, they miss the
opportunity to satisfy user goals more creatively.

- Ineffective integration of promising ideas: The team may consider a radically different
idea, but it abandons it because it does not fit with how the team conceives of the rest
of the design. It misses the fact that a radical idea in one area of the design will require
new ideas throughout the design before it can be fully integrated. For example, one
cannot move from a quill pen dipped in ink to a pen with an onboard ink supply without
also redesigning the nib of the pen.

“The team was not effective at engaging everyone on the team in the search for creative,
integrated design concepts.”

Based on Getting Design Right, A Systems Approach, Peter L. Jackson, CRC Press, 2010.
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 “The most fruitful idea may come from the least assertive team member.”

You create a climate for creativity by building times of exploration into your project plan and by
recognizing when the design process should be interrupted with a new exploration phase.

The techniques here are focused on two parts of the process:

1. Discover concepts relevant to the design problem at hand,
2. Combine the concepts and generate integrated solutions.

3.1 Discover Concepts

Use the following steps:

1. Clarify the problem and decompose the functions,
2. Brainstorm and research,
3. Organize concept fragments,
4. Prune and expand.

3.1.1 Clarify the Problem and Decompose the Functions

That is, we can distinguish between requirements that specify primary capabilities and those that
specify constraints.
- A primary capability is a function that the system must perform to accomplish the mission,
- A constraint is a requirement on how the system must perform its primary functions.

In other words, these two aspects contrast the “what” (what the system must do) with the “how”
(how it must do it).

“It is best to approach primary capability requirements from a behavioral perspective.”

Once you have developed a detailed functional view of the problem, we next need to isolate
those details that matter most.

3.1.2 Brainstorm and Research

A concept fragment is an idea that can be used to satisfy a functional requirement!

For brainstorming to be effective, there must be agreement and discipline not to discuss the
flaws in any proposed ideas until the brainstorming session is over. Without this discipline,
social inhibitions will cut off the creativity. Stop the brainstorming session before the group
tires of it. Move to a serious discussion of the ideas proposed.

“The goal in this phase of the discovery process is to uncover as many concept fragments as
possible”

Concept fragments can be discovered through a process of research by studying competitors’

products! Are there related products that perform a similar function? Patent searches are another
source of novel ideas.
Based on Getting Design Right, A Systems Approach, Peter L. Jackson, CRC Press, 2010.
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Other ideas can come from talking with customers, particularly with customers who have special
expertise or experience.

3.1.3 Organize Concept Fragments

A concept classification tree is an organization of concept fragments into a tree-structured hierarchy.

3.1.4 Prune and Expand

The purpose of creating the concept classification tree is to see if the categories created suggest
any further ideas and whether some branches have to be expanded. On the other hand, it is also
appropriate to prune or eliminate branches from further consideration (“avoid making a battery-
powered toy”). Sometimes “we have to constrain the design space”.

3.2 Explore Concepts

The concept fragments are the raw material for generating design ideas! Next, it is required to
explore the ways in which these ideas can be combined to form design solutions:
1. Combine the concept fragments,
2. Generate integrated concepts,
3. Identify the subsystems.

3.2.1 Combine Concept Fragments

A concept combination table , a morphology box, is matrix of concept fragments organized by function
(in each column) so that an integrated concept can be created by choosing any concept fragment
for each function and combining them to satisfy the complete required functionality.

See table 4.9 on page 115!

Based on Getting Design Right, A Systems Approach, Peter L. Jackson, CRC Press, 2010.
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“Every combination of ideas from a morphology box takes you down a different design path.”

Hence, summarizing:
1. Think about the problem from a functional perspective,
2. Analyze the overall function into distinct separate functions,
3. Think of different ways to solve each function, and
4. Systematically combine these alternatives to suggest new ways to solve the original
problem.

3.2.2 Generate Integrated Concepts

The next step is to take each suggested approach (or the most promising) and work out an
integrated design concept for that concept combination perhaps to the level of building a
prototype, but this will be limited by your skill, domain knowledge, and the time available.

Summarizing:
- The technique encourages the search for numerous alternatives,
- It has a good chance of engaging the entire team,
- It explicitly looks for concept fragments from diverse sources,
- It also looks at the possibility of radical changes in multiple areas at once, thereby
increasing the likelihood of discovering novel integrated solutions.

3.2.3 Identify Subsystems

“A subsystem is a collection of elements of a system that has an identifiable function of its own.”

The concern is that if you identify subsystems too early in the design process, you become
trapped into thinking about the design problem using your first design concept.

In this stage you enter the surface phase in which we look at all of the detail we have created and
organize it into more abstract categories.

First: create a long unordered list of the functions and components that we have been working
with during the exploration of design concepts,

Second: the collected components that were named in our integrated concept diagrams will be
“dragged and dropped” into the columns created by the functions with whom they match.

Third: we create a “new column” whenever a cell does not seem to fit (“have an affinity for”)
cells in an existing column.

Note that we end by listing components from different integrated concepts together, provided
they perform a similar function. It is a useful exercise to look at each component that has been
identified and classify it by function.

Based on Getting Design Right, A Systems Approach, Peter L. Jackson, CRC Press, 2010.
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Finally, we look at the functionality expressed by the column and devise a column heading that
captures that functionality. These column headings describe what we can now refer to as the
subsystems of our product.

Conventional automobile architecture. (Adapted with permission from

MovingGraphics.ca)

Sedan version of General Motors concept car “Hy-Wire.” (Used with permission
from GM Media Archives.)
Based on Getting Design Right, A Systems Approach, Peter L. Jackson, CRC Press, 2010.
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