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This body of research aims to improve support for engineering design and in particular the design of machine systems from standard components. It is widely accepted that the inclusion of standard components in systems can significantly reduce cost and improve the quality of design solutions, as well as reducing time to market. Standard components play an important role in engineering design, which like many other industry sectors is now a highly competitive global market. To assist the incorporation of standard components in design solutions many suppliers and manufacturers produce electronic representations that govern the design and selection of a particular component. These representations are powerful tools for the identification and selection of individual components and significantly benefit the designer. However, the role of the designer is not just to select a range of suitable component sizes, but also to select an optimum mix of component types and sizes to deliver the desired performance characteristics, physical characteristics and quality at minimal cost. Current practices require the designer to manually evaluate many different combinations of component types and sizes in order to determine an acceptable solution. This iterative process is particularly time-consuming and analytically intensive. It is therefore highly desirable to support the designer over this process. To deliver such support a modelling approach is proposed which considers the system as a whole but also maintains the integrity of the various electronic representations necessary for the design and selection of each component. In this manner, systems of real components are dealt with. A review of modelling approaches in engineering design and computer based support tools is undertaken. It is shown that current technologies do not provide for the modelling capabilities necessary to represent systems containing standard components. As a consequence, a new modelling approach is proposed that represents the performance of mechanical systems. In the development of the new modelling approach this research has had to address six key issues; system representation, a protocol for handling interactions, system resolution, data arbitration, compatibility analysis and interfacing third party electronic representations within the modelling approach. In addition to this, two other issues are investigated that are necessary for the strategic design of systems. These are cost forecasting for systems of standard components and the issues associated with the application of optimisation techniques. The feasibility of the overall modelling approach is demonstrated through the creation of a computer based support tool which is applied to a number of industrial case studies. The research shows that it is possible to consider systems of standard components at the early stages of design and to provide for the automatic embodiment of conceptual solutions from standard components. Thereby freeing the designer's time to evaluate many more alternatives and develop a more refined design solution.

Engineers Talk Be it through conversations, meetings, informal discussion, phone calls or E-Mail, Engineering Design Communication is the main tributary for the sharing of knowledge, thoughts and ideas, and therefore, fundamental to Engineering Work. An engineer spends a significant portion of their day communicating as they 'fill in the gaps' left by formal documentation and processes. It is thereby, an inherent source of explicit design rationale that relates to (and very often supplements) Engineering Records and their generation. Engineering Design Communication is not only central for Engineering Work and Records but also offers potential - through aggregation - to reveal underlying features, patterns and signatures that could aid current and future Engineering Project Management. As Engineering Design Communication plays such a pivotal role, it comes as no surprise that there is much extant research. The majority of this is descriptive and has focused on identifying patterns in engineers' communication behaviour as well as analysing the utility of currently employed communication tools/mediums (such as, E-Mail and meetings). However, little prescriptive research - through either a tool or process - has been undertaken. This may be due to the considerable challenges facing research in this field such as the need to maintain a high-level of Engineering Context, ensure the right engineers are able to participate and associate the communication with its respective Engineering Records. All of which, has to be achieved within an Engineering Context where teams are becoming larger, more mobile, multi-disciplinary & distributed, and often performing variant or incremental design. Although, it is argued that Social Media has the potential to militate these challenges through the use of technologies that provide agile development, support for ubiquitous computing and sharing of multimedia. Therefore, this thesis investigates how Social Media can be used to support Engineering Design Communication. This is achieved through the elicitation and synthesis of the requirements for supporting Engineering Design Communication, and consideration of the effective application of the Social Media. This forms the basis from which a Social Media approach to support Engineering Design Communication is created and then instantiated within a tool called PartBook. PartBook has been developed iteratively and involved an industrial study to evaluate and improve functionality. It has since been used within an eleven week Formula Student project involving thirty-four students from multiple engineering disciplines in a distributed working environment. The analysis of which addresses the validation of the requirements that has led to amendments and generation of new requirements as well as evaluation of the Social Media approach that has led to insights into the potential impact such a tool could bring to Engineering Work, Records and Project Management.

The use, reuse and manipulation of information has become a key factor in the success of any organisation in an increasingly competitive and global business environment. Ensuring that employees are able to access (or are provided with) the right information in a timely manner is one of the key challenges facing organisations. Amongst the dominant communication methods email fills an important role in facilitating distributed communication and it is seen as a key target for improvement. Email is being used extensively and increasingly as a significant (and often dominant) method for communication within engineering organisations and projects and there exists significant opportunity and requirement to improve the use and reuse of email. This thesis contributes a rich understanding of the practise and perception of email use and reuse developed through a comprehensive review of the literature and three investigative studies: a study of the content of emails exchanged during an engineering project, a survey of practising engineers describing the role of email in supporting communication in projects and engineers perception of email, and a investigation of the information about the relationships between engineers participating in a project as represented by their exchanges of email. The second main contribution is a set of scenarios that were developed to summarise the understanding developed in the investigative studies, and form a core set of contextualised problems that can be used to communicate the research to industry and around which an holistic proposal is described to improve engineers use and reuse of email. The final contribution is an approach for supporting engineers in interpreting emails by the provision of additional contextual information, mitigating a core problem identified during the course of the research for which a well established information management solution does not already exist.

Vehicle vibration is inherently random and non-stationary with a non-Gaussian distribution. In addition, variations in vehicle parameters, product payloads and distribution journeys mean that the characteristics of vibration are not identical for all distribution journeys. Because vehicle vibration and shock are key causes of damage during distribution, their simulation in pre-distribution testing is vital in order to ensure that adequate protection is provided for transported products. The established method set out in the current testing standards utilises a global set of averaged accelerated power spectral density spectra to construct random vibration signals. These signals are stationary with Gaussian distributions and, therefore, do not fully represent actual vehicle vibration, only an average. The aim of the investigation, reported on in this Thesis, was to create an improved test regime for simulating vehicle vibration for pre-distribution testing of packaging. This aim has been achieved through the construction of representative tests and the creation of realistic simulations with statistical significance. A journey database has been created, in which historic road profile data along with a quarter vehicle model have been used to approximate a known vehicle’s vibration on a specific distribution journey. Additionally, a wavelet decomposition method, in which wavelet analysis is used to decompose the approximate vehicle vibration in to a series of Gaussian approximations of varying amplitude and spectral content, has been developed. Along with theoretical work, case studies have been undertaken in order to validate the test regime.

Experimental study of the designer plays a critical role in design research. However laboratory based study is often poorly compared and contrasted to practice, leading to a lack of uptake and subsequent research impact. The importance of addressing this issue is highlighted by its significant influence on design research and many related fields. As such the main aim of this work is to improve empirical design research by characterising the relationship between practice and laboratory-based studies for critical design situations. A review of the state of the art methods in design research and key related fields is reported. This highlights the importance and commonality of a set or core issues connected to the failure to effectively link study of practice and study in the laboratory. Further to this a technical review and scoping was carried out to establish the most efective capture strategy to be used when studying the designer empirically. Subsequently three studies are reported, forming a three point comparison between practice the laboratory (with student practitioners) and an intermediary case (a laboratory with practitioners) . Results from these studies contextualise the critical situations in practice and develop a detailed multi-level comparison between practice and the laboratory which was then validated with respect to a number of existing studies. The primary contribution of this thesis is the development of a detailed multi-level relationship between practice and the laboratory for critical design situations: information seeking, ideation and design review. The second key contribution is the development of a generic method for the empirical study of designers in varying contexts - allowing researchers to build on this work and more effectively link diverse studies together. The final key contribution of this work is the identification of a number of core methodological issues and mitigating techniques affecting both design research and its related fields.

Product appearance plays a significant role in generating appeal for consumers and subsequent commercial success for mass-market products. Associated with the design and manufacture of many mass-market products is significant financial investment and thus also significant risk. This risk is particularly severe for established or mature markets such as consumer electronics and vehicles where designs must retain a brand identity and differentiate from other products while still being easily identifiable, and avoid potential design right or trade dress infringement. Within the design process there is ‘styling’, the activity primarily concerned with the creation of products’ form and appearance. While appearance is the primary concern in styling there is a wide range of factors that must be considered alongside appearance when designers evaluate potential design concepts. While there exists many tools and methods to objectively evaluate and communicate factors such as cost, performance, manufacture or ergonomics, there are few strategies to assist designers in objectively evaluating and reasoning on appearance, despite its relative importance to the market success of products. The aim of this thesis is to improve the styling process by researching and creating a method to more objectively measure and compare product appearance. In proposing a method and achieving the aim three major areas of research are addressed. The first is to create an approach to visually decompose products into constituent features to explore their influence on overall appearance. The second is to create a method of measurement to analyse the geometry of features and enable comparison across product ranges. The third is to investigate how the measures can be applied to assist designers during the styling process and provide insights into the strategic use of visual branding. The progression through these research areas and the subsequent proposed method form the key contribution to knowledge of this thesis. Through the application of the method to various case studies and a comprehensive study in its complete form, the method is validated and its potential use to designers demonstrated.

In modern organisations, the effective use of information and knowledge is a prerequisite for sustaining competitive advantage. To support this, considerable work has been undertaken by both academia and industry to improve the representation, organisation and access of information across and between organisations. This improved information and communication management has had a positive impact on business processes, improved decision making and – importantly – increased levels of innovation. However, one area that has received less attention is personal information such as logbooks, maintained by a majority of engineers. Many of these logbooks could contain significant amount of design information and knowledge which is not recorded elsewhere, such as design rationale and records of alternatives considered. Indeed, much of what we know about the work of historically important engineers and scientists such as Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) has come from their personal collections of notes. Despite this, logbooks are rarely formally managed, with the content usually only available to the authoring engineer. It is arguable that such potentially valuable information should be more easily accessible to the individual and wider organisation, where it could be of benefit as a personal productivity aid, a design record and also for intellectual property and audit/traceability purposes. It follows that there is a need to create improved methods for managing logbook content, which is the challenge that this research addresses. This research first seeks to establish the reasons for the stubborn persistence of paper logbooks as such a common feature of engineering work, despite almost every other aspect being undertaken in the digital domain. Various studies are undertaken, revealing that logbooks are used for a wide range of purposes, such as the critical role of ‘mediating’ between various information sources. The requirements arising from these studies are used together with a review of existing e-logbook technologies to produce a comprehensive requirement specification for an engineering electronic-logbook. At its core is a novel information management strategy based combination of templates to pre-structure entries and a lightweight information classification schema to structure the information. They key features of the specification are the ability for logbook information to be searched, shared and integrated with other information systems, whilst retaining important characteristics of paper logbooks (such as sketching support). The contributions of this thesis are the fundamental understanding of logbook use and content, together with a comprehensive specification for an engineering e-logbook to improve logbook information management for both the individual and wider organisation.

The use of email as a communication and information sharing medium in large, complex, globally distributed engineering projects is widespread; yet there exists little understanding of the content of the emails exchanged and the implications of this content on the design project, design records and contracts. The importance of these issues is underlined by the fact that email records can now be required as evidence in legal disputes. It follows that the overall aim of this research is to assess the role and use of email in engineering design projects. A state-of-the-art review of literature pertaining to email is reported, along with a review of information and communication processes in engineering design projects. The primary contribution of this thesis is the creation of a content based approach for analysing the role and use of email in engineering design projects. This centres on the development and application of a coding scheme to email text, identifying what subject matter an email relates to, why it was sent, and how its content is expressed. Results are then analysed with respect to the frequencies of each code and other variables, including how coding varies between different senders and throughout the project duration. The second key contribution of this thesis is the analysis of emails and content in an engineering setting by applying the aforementioned approach to two case studies. The major case study concerned a large, complex, globally distributed, multimillion pound systems engineering project, from which 16 000 emails were obtained. It was found that emails are mainly used to transfer information but also to support management functions. Emails facilitate design work but little of this takes place explicitly in the email content. Characteristics of a project affect the subject matter or emails but have little effect on why they are sent. User roles and personal preferences also influence email use. If was found that the purposes for sending emails varied over the duration of a project; it was further determined that these changes could be used to identify project progress and design activity. Implications of the findings are identified in relation to: information management, knowledge management, project management, collaboration and email practice. Significantly, emails do contain potentially important design information and because these often support decisions made elsewhere, emails should be integrated with wider records. More consideration and training should be given to the use of project standards for email use and guidelines for composition. Changes in email use over the project duration could be a potential tool for project managers to identify design progress and possible issues in a project.