Evolution of property predictability during conceptual design

A product is designed with the purpose of possessing certain properties, which are prescribed as requirements in the design specification. It is a common understanding that early design work and the resulting selected design concept have a significant impact on the subsequent phases of the design process and on the properties of the obtained design result. However, during the early phases of design every decision and choice of solution is based on incomplete information. The nature of early design work is to formulate the design problem based on an interpretation of a need, to generate a set of design alternatives, and identify the alternative which properties are best predicted to fulfil the requirements. The objective of this paper is to study the evolution of property predictability during the early phases of design in a case study context, and reflect on the implications this may have on design work. By the term property predictability, we refer to the designers’ confidence in predicting product properties based on the available information. Since knowledge about the design problem and solution space grows as the design process progresses, our main hypothesis for the study is that the level of property predictability will increase along with the progression of the design process as well.