| Engineering design problems are, in general, open-ended, under-defined, and over-constrained. Similar problems occur in non-engineering domains as well. Practitioners from each domain have developed unique techniques for handling the informational processing and judgment-making requirements of this sort of problem. This dissertation takes three of these unique problem-solving techniques and adapts them for use in engineering design. First, the ancient method of casuistry is taken from the ethical problem-solving domain and proves to be an effective method for evaluating and comparing multiple solutions to design problems as well as providing a linguistic tool that can be used to develop design requirements from ambiguous social concerns. Second, the concept of dependency is also taken from the ethical problem-solving domain and proves to be an effective method for organizing the information accumulated during the design process. Third and finally, decision models from decision theory are examined and used to gain a greater understanding of the engineering design process as well as to give engineering design practitioners options in the way they make judgments. These techniques are illustrated with both examples from their home domain and the engineering design domain and evaluated with respect to the benefits and costs they bring to the engineering design process. These three processes are merely the beginning of the benefits that can be gained through the cross-domain communication of problem-solving techniques. |
